Let's face it, we're all shooting the same stuff: people, animals, natural formations (plants, water, rocks), and artificial formations (buildings, clothing, toilets). We're all using cameras. What *isn't* cliche? Nothing! What I think matters is what we bring to and get out of them.
I don't even care about the fake tilt/shift thing: while I think it's annoying to see a rash of "hey, I got the effect!" examples of it, you can create just as pointless a photo with camera movements on film as you can in Photoshop. Same goes for fake vignetting, xpro, whatever. What annoys me about these rashes of work by people who all read the same tutorial or downloaded the same Photoshop action (or bought the same film camera) is that, in most cases, all they've got going for them is the effect. A crap photo with a special effect--achieved in-camera or in post--is still a crap photo, and dressing it up in an effect doesn't change that. (As a friend from North Carolina says, "you can't make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t".) What matters to me is if you managed to ask or say anything with it, and that's rare with any technique or subject (most photos, regardless of the photographer, suck). OK, you got the look, be it T/S or wet plate collodion--now what? What are you communicating other than that? Does the look or subject (flowers, nudes, homeless, etc.) serve a larger story or inquiry or is that the entirety of your statement?
I think *that's* what really determines whether something is cliche, in the bad sense, or not: whether you bring anything to it or simply do it as a rote matter of canonical form. This can happen not just with DLSR users, but with people with heaps of technical silver skill as well... there are scores of Zone-heads who have exposure and printing *down*, but instead of channeling that knowledge into something of their own, they spend their time trying to make a print whose technical execution Ansel Adams would approve of but forgetting about what I consider to be the important parts (this happens just as much with toys, pinholes, Lomos, alt process printing, and all the other stuff we think we're cool for using). On the flip side, a good photo is a good photo. I've seen (and taken) plenty of photos of [ostensibly] unconventional subjects using unconventional methods that are absolute crap and I've seen wedding, baby, and flower pictures that positively sing. To me, it's a matter of thoughtless "me-too"-ism vs. genuine exploration or expression.
All of that said, I think a lot of people *want* to take cliche photos. I wrote this to someone I've been emailing with after he commented about the awful HDR stuff that's been around lately just for the sake of doing HDR:
"I do think that you and I are coming from a different place with all of this than most people are. The more of other people's work I look at, the more I think that I have a *very* different idea of what makes a good photo than most people. Not a better or worse one, just very different. I think a lot of people, at least on Flickr, are aiming to replicate the styles that commerce says are good: stuff you see in Sierra Club day planners and on postcards. They're measuring themselves entirely by the yardsticks of others, which IME spells certain doom for any sort of genuine inquiry or exploration--but not everybody wants that because it's scary as shit.
I guess it depends on how big a box you put things in. I know and have read interviews with pastry chefs for whom flavoring their creme brulee with fruit puree is a radical act. This blows my mind, not because I think it's radical, but because the creative space they've put themselves in must be narrow indeed for that to seem crazy. To me, that's the equivalent of finally taking your camera off of P. But again, I guess stepping into real possibilities and away from certain validation (you'll always be able to find 20 people to say 'great DoF!' on that flower macro regardless of how good or bad it is) is scary."
