Australian Photography – August 2021
English | 78 pages | pdf | 55.27 MB
GOOD ARTISTS COPY, GREAT ARTISTS STEAL?
Have you ever heard this quote above? It has been accredited to a few people over the years – Steve Jobs, Pablo Picasso, William Faulkner – but whoever said it first, the essence is the same – that stealing is a part of artistic genius.
Now I can’t claim to be the first to consider it in the context of photography, but recently I watched a YouTube video by Ted Forbes of channel The Art of Photography (You can watch it here: https://bit.ly/3ADFgoq) who did just this, and much more eloquently than I ever could. As he says, while inspiration is essential to photography and copying a picture can teach you a great deal, there is a point where you have to dig deeper and try and find your own voice. YouTube videos, Instagram, photography magazines – whatever your particular poison, everything you create is a combination of your influences.
To take that a step further, my own influences are probably reflected in this magazine with the kind of content I choose to publish – which in turn may end up influencing you!
Of course, there’s also a school of thought out there that there’s nothing truly original at all. But copying a particular style from someone you admire can be one of the best ways to get a start on your creative journey. I know for me, seeing great travel photos taken by my friends made me want to get out there and take my own, which then opened me up to other styles of photography and eventually working for this Australian Photography magazine Issue.
However, at some point most people will find that just being derivative of others will stifle their creative process. There are exceptions to this of course – the most obvious being artist Richard Prince, famous and notorious in equal measure for shamelessly appropriating others work through ‘rephotographing’ and then selling the prints. Sure, what Prince does is definitely theft, but it’s also a very literal (and arguably creative) interpretation of the quote at the top of this page.
So, what if you interpreted the steal part differently, and took it to mean taking an idea and then making it your own? This would give you something original.
If you can then combine this with something interesting, you might then be onto something. None of this is easy nor straightforward, and those who have been successful at doing it will likely have spent their entire lives to get to that point. But it is an interesting idea worth considering with your own photography – what makes it unique, and
how is it different to what others are doing? Doing this regularly might not make you a genius, but it may make your work something special.
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