Why does so much of our work look so much alike, even when we strive for it to look so different?
Given yesterday’s discussion I had to investigate. In less than 5 minutes last night, for no apparent reason, I was able to find about 20 of my images that look, feel, appear, strangely similar to nearly 20 images in the 2008 PDN Photo Annual. Thus, even in the face of working on new, experimental stuff, we are somehow the same. – click the ‘continue reading’ link to see examples of what I mean after the jump –
Here’s some quick examples – grabbed in just a couple minutes from my collection and compared loosely to other images in the magazine… No Photoshop, just a quick grab of what was easy and near…here’s a handful:
Raymond Meier
Chase Jarvis – shot thru some cascading water just 3 weeks ago in Dubai.
Yours Truly.
Gary Land
Steve Bloom
Me
Mine
Will Van Overbeek
and even
Christopher Weidlich
Remember – all these in the same single issue of a magazine.
Chase Jarvis
Joao Canziani
Still the same issue…
And here’s a quickie of two other photogs from the same issue;
Tony Law
Stephen Wilkes
And the list goes on…
Strangely, sadly, beautifully, whatever. As much as we all work to push outside the box, we are all–in so many ways–inextricably tied to one another in our commercial work, our fine art work, our time, our editors, our websites, our contests.
As much as we hate this, we must admit it. Are we all trite? Hacks? Are we all visionless? No. Certainly not. We’re all human, I suppose. As unique and disparate artists as we all are or all at least try to be, there must be some pudding, or at least some social fabric in us all, that is very much the same–whether we like it or not.
[By the way, if this theme is interesting to you, go watch Errol Morris’ documentary film Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control. One of my personal favorites.]
i've been dealing with the same thing myself for a long time – in my desperate tries to get out of the box in my art – build the "perfect alien" form the "perfect foreign world".
There are 7 billion people on the planet, but the most important thing is that we live in a world where we have the same known universe, with the same elements, and we're trying to combine these elements so that we can make a point, but there's one thing wrong – we're all using the same stuff! And for complete originality you need not to use these elements, and in photography that's kind of hard… It is also kind of hard to fold space and get extra angles, so if you think about it, too many photographers are sticked to the same elements and the same angles (people, buildings, cars, water, mountains, etc.) 🙂 It's very hard to get something original, but getting things to look a little bit different is art! So you need to extend this earthly thinking a little bit further, and maybe one day you'll get the most original work you've ever done….
(and one year after that you'll see it on several other photographers, but hey… at least you did it first!! :)) )
For me the work is all very different, but features some of the same elements. That’s fine. The important thing for me isn’t actually the idea anymore…
As far as I’m concerned, there are that many people doing photography that anything I think up has been done before by someone, somewhere. Nothing is new.
The trick to being creative is developing a style and then using your style to shoot that same content in your own way.
Just my take on it
Jay
PS. Make sure your swimmer doesn’t think you’re comparing her body to that of an elephant!!! 😉