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Thoughts on the Nativity |
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Sunday, 02 January 2005 |
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Today I went to an exhibition presenting hundreds of nativity scenes from around the world. For some reason this is the second such exhibition that I've seen in the last few weeks, and it got me thinking about photography.
Here's why : The Nativity has been part of Christian tradition for thousands of years, and for all that time it has been represented in many shapes, sizes and media. Paintings, sculptures, wood, glass, concrete, ultra-modern, primitive, oriental, you name it, it's been done, thousands upon thousands of times. And people keep doing it, they keep trying to do new things or to revisit the classics. The scene itself is pretty simple : Mary, Joseph, baby Jesus, some kind of shelter, animals, shepherds, angels, mages, not much variety, but the interpretations and variety of the individual Scenes is amazing, considering the relative simpleness of the starting subject.
Now, what does this have to do with photography ? Photography has been around for a little more than a century and a half, and at the rate at which images are produced, I defy anyone to take an image that has not been taken before. Can you imagine how many millions of photographs there are in photo albums around the world that represent exactly the same thing ? How many pictures of the Eiffel Tower, of Big Ben, of the Statue of Liberty, of Half Dome ?
I often see photo critiques in the lines of : this has been done, it's cliché, it's not original. I've even seen a recent discussion where people were questioning the integrity of a photographer because his work looked too closely like his influences. Some of my own images come from my love for the work of Shatz, Weston, Sieff and Jonvelle, among others, and I think that anyone has to build his own creativity on the foundations laid by his forebearers. I don't feel that there is anything wrong with creating images that have been made before, as long as the creation process puts a part of you in the final product.
I know a photographer, Pierre Magne who does as part of his work nude in industrial settings. It's one of the "clichéest" of clichés, the contrast of the softness of the model with the roughness of the setting, but still, his work is different from other photographers who do the same kind of work... In the same lines, Eric Bouthilier-Brown makes nudes in the landscape, another "niche" where thousands upon thousands of images have been made. But yet, when I stumble across one of his images, I tend to recognize them, because there is something of him in them.
In short, I'll defend my right to do images that have been seen before, otherwise I'd have to stop taking pictures... |
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