As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Light, shadows, depth of field and colour can all be used to capture a sense of place and tell a destination’s story. Icelandair, however, decided to turn that theory on its head.
And typically, when an airline launches a search for a new photographer, you’d expect a pristine portfolio to be part of the application. That was not the case with Blanche Mortemard, who had something rather different: a “camera roll of bad photos”, as described to Euronews Travel.
Out of 127,642 people who came forward to share their, well, lack of photographic talent in the hopes of being crowned the “world’s worst photographer”, it was Mortemard’s collection of snaps that stood out.
The carrier set out to prove that even someone with zero photography skills can take great photos of the Nordic island as part of its "Really Bad Photographer" campaign.
“This is part four of our 'Real Unreal' umbrella,” Gísli S. Brynólfsson, Icelandair's director of global marketing, told Euronews Travel, adding that since 2025, the carrier has been emphasising the country’s authenticity and realness as a destination of choice against the rise of AI-generated images and spread of misleading travel information.
