Occasionally I like to go back and look at some of the photographs I took when I first started photographing. I was living in London at the time and one of my favourite ways to spend my free time was to wander around the city with my camera, looking for undiscovered places or rediscovering familiar ones, just like I'm rediscovering my old photos. Isn't rediscovering or reinventing what street and landscape photography is all about today?
So much has been done on the subject that it's hard to say you're discovering a new place. I'm sure someone has come across this alley before and taken a picture of it. But maybe it wasn't at night, maybe the car wasn't covered with a sheet? Maybe it wasn't raining?
Yes, hundreds of photos of the same places have been taken since the great masters of street photography like Saule Leiter or Todd Hido. It's hard to get away with repeating what someone else has done before. But art does not exist in a vacuum. We all repeat, more or less consciously and to a greater or lesser extent, what someone else has done. Unfortunately, I can't answer the question of whether this is good or bad. Maybe it doesn't matter?
"Shadow" - Song by Chromatics ' |
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