Une Française gagne le concours de la photo la plus moche

What does “cliché” mean in French?

Un cliché is the French word for a photographic shot — a snapshot, a frame. It’s also, exactly as in English, a cliché: a tired, overused idea. That double life makes “casser le cliché” a perfect pun in a story about a photo contest: literally it breaks the (bad) snapshot, figuratively it shatters the stereotype. One word, two payoffs.

Both senses were born in the print shop. A cliché was a metal printing plate that stamped the same image again and again; a worker who kept repeating himself was said to “tirer son cliché.” That endless reprinting gave us the figurative “cliché” — and when 19th-century photography arrived, the same word slid over to mean a single captured image.