What does it mean when a background element is called "distracting" in a photo?

"Distracting" is a word often thrown around in online photo-critique, usually without much specificity. It's a criticism that can be applied to any aspect of a photo without, ultimately, need for justification — thus, it occupies a sweet spot between clearly opinionated comments like "very pretty!" or on the other hand, overly prescriptive rules which are easy to dismiss (they're made to be broken, after all). Therefore, if you want to sound like an expert with little effort, pick some aspect of a photograph and call it out as a distraction. Presto! (And not to sound too high-mighty on this — it's something I've done too!) But is that all there is to it? Read on...

I had a suspicion that this idea of "distraction" as a no-no was a fairly recent meme — maybe not just in the last few years, but, say, since the dawn of the Internet. But, no! In searching for a really helpful definition, I found references in critiques from as far back as 1899 ("care must be taken that the shadows cast on it are not too distracting"), and a quite harsh bit from 1922 basically hinges on distraction ("Too many distracting elements visible."). By 1944, photographic "distractions" are all over Popular Photography ("the fish is just a distracting element, and should be cropped").

Okay, so, this is definitely a thing. People have been complaining about distractions for almost as long as photography has been available to the masses. But, it's not always just the unqualified complaint. In searching, I found a nice 1944 Popular Photography article entitled "Pictures that Say Something", by H. Lou Gibson. Gibson writes:

Photographic art is the transmutation of thought into silver. If your subject matter is to be appropriate, it should comprise only those elements required to generate your thought in the minds of others. This article has dealt with what to do in order to accomplish this, but has as yet given no warning on what not to do. Remember, then, that distracting treatments or elements must not be employed. [...]

Distracting elements are those which attract attention but which do not help carry the thought. A few examples are: the telephone pole in the pastoral; the wrist-watch on the nude; the garbage can in the garden snapshot; the light switch on the wall behind the informal portrait; the extra space around any subject that should be treated as a closeup.

(Emphasis added.)

That's a pretty good, useful definition — even if we're using 1s and 0s instead of silver most of the time now. But, I think most importantly, it starts with an axiom — the idea that photography is the transmutation of thought. And that's really key. Not everyone's photography serves that purpose. We could probably argue about the true essence of photography all day (in chat, presumably), and not everyone will agree on that. If you don't agree with this premise, then the rule doesn't necessarily follow.

If you do, though, it seems like a pretty good, time-honored one (even if it does get tossed around so loosely), and the basic logic is useful for a wide range of "thought", from the simple examples of the telephone pole, watch, or light switch, all the way up to including wanting all of those apparently-random elements there intentionally. If there's an element in your photograph which you feel like is part of that expression, and someone calls out "Distracting!", you can freely smile to yourself and think: "Good, I 'distracted' you from what you misinterpreted as the meaning."

So, with that in mind — and going back to my first paragraph — I'd like to humbly suggest that it's really better to say what the offending element distracts from. Like this: "I just can't get my mind off of that wrist-watch... its presence here suggests to me that this is about the artificiality of time, so if that's what you were going for, I think it succeeds." But, if someone doesn't, and just points to something as "distracting", they certainly are in line with long precedent in amateur critique.