Now everyone's an artist

It's official: the elitist art world has bowed to the pressure of a global phenomenon. No longer will random amateur snapshots be confined (if that's not too much of an oxymoron in this context) to the likes of YouTube, MySpace and weblogs worldwide. London's contemporary art behemoth, Tate Modern, is sponsoring a photographic exhibition to which amateurs like me - whose digital holiday snaps are so incompetent, they're rarely worth even downloading - are actively encouraged to contribute.

So, on a baking weekend in central London as part of a four-strong team of strangers with a borrowed camera, I raced against the clock Challenge Anneka-style in search of an Einstein lookalike to photograph. (We were turned down three times, perhaps understandably in the case of our third attempt - seeing as he was black, and with a lot less white hair than was ideal for our purposes).

The event was called ShootLondon, a new annual competition dubbed by its organisers "London's hippest treasure hunt". And "Find Albert's doppelganger" was by far the easiest of the 10 challenges (seven of which were landmark-specific) that we, along with 54 other teams of varying ages, professions and camera proficiency, were on a mission to complete by 6pm. The concept - dreamed up by a multimedia company in east London - was simply to get people to look at their surroundings in a different light.

As we hared down the South Bank back to the Tate, minutes from our 6pm deadline, I was still clutching the melting ice-cream we had just used in our attempt to respond to the clue: "London's central artery stretches over 200 miles and was once the home to numerous ice fairs". Despite Googling, we had failed to locate the Elizabethans' preferred skating stretch of the Thames and settled for an abstract interpretation: our riverside ice-cream had a speech bubble reading, "Can I go on the big wheel, Dad?" "It might win the 'wittiest photo' category," I suggested hopefully. My team-mates were less optimistic.

Our treasure hunt also took us to Vauxhall, to photograph its futuristic new bus station; to Covent Garden, for a furtive shot of ourselves on skateboards while the shop assistants weren't looking; and to Bloomsbury, where we borrowed shears from the a tool shop as "hilarious" props to suggest an attempt to cause a power cut ... until the shop owner said, "Funny, that. You're the third group of people to ask for those."

Finally, it was back to the Tate for a screen-projected slide-show of everyone's efforts. The quality was patchy - but the winning shot of Vauxhall bus station used clever angles and shadows (no PhotoShopping allowed) to make the image's subject appear to be skiing off the end of the roof.

So is this democratisation of the world the shape of things to come in our galleries? Last year's holiday snapshots micro-show at the Hayward hints that a trend is in the making. So if the National ever plans a "portraits of Einstein lookalikes" show, they know where to come.