Originality comes after imitation

Decision-Making

owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knock-offs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours. Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialise. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station. But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognised as being truly your own.

What’s the solution? ‘It’s simple,’ Minkkinen says. ‘Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.’ A little further out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage - the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills and accumulating experience.

The first hundred photographs look like somebody else’s.

This is apparently shocking to people who learned by looking at somebody else’s photographs.

Technique begins with imitation because choices are still being borrowed: distance, light, framing, subject, what counts as finished. The novice can either remain long enough to discover which of those choices fit their own attention, or panic at resemblance and start being derivative in a different genre.

“Stay on the fucking bus” works because distinctiveness is often a consequence of accumulated decisions. Keep returning to one problem and reality begins forcing departures from the model. The local subject behaves differently. A constraint requires another method. Taste sharpens through hundreds of small rejections.

Persistence has a flattering counterfeit. Repeating the same weak move for years while calling criticism impatience produces no originality, merely tenure. The evidence is learning: is the work asking better questions, absorbing feedback and changing because the subject demands it?

Naming influences makes this easier. Secrecy turns ancestry into shame and encourages cosmetic novelty. Say what was borrowed. Then identify where the current piece departs and why.

Photograph 101 is technically stronger and painfully familiar. Photograph 240 includes an odd choice the tutor dislikes. Photograph 400 makes that choice again for a better reason. The resemblance has not vanished. It has become one voice in a larger argument.