Originality lying on the far side of unoriginality

Decision-Making

The final principle is that, more often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality. The Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen dramatises this deep truth about the power of patience with a parable about Helsinki’s main bus station. There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one - and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops. Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction - perhaps you start working on platinum prints of nudes - and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the 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.

Early work often resembles existing work because skill is learned through existing forms. The beginner tries techniques, copies structures and produces versions somebody has already produced better. Embarrassing, yes. Also normal.

The dangerous response is restarting whenever comparison appears. A new subject, new medium or new style restores the pleasant feeling of potential while preventing the repetition through which judgement develops. Novelty at the level of topic can hide stagnation at the level of skill. Continuing does not guarantee originality. A person can repeat the same imitation for twenty years. The work has to change through attention: notice what keeps recurring, which choices feel necessary, which borrowed habits no longer fit and what the audience responds to for reasons you can explain.

There is commercial pressure to declare distinctiveness far too early. New brands publish grand verbal principles before making enough things to discover how they actually behave. Creators write manifestos for a voice they have used twice. The result is often generic confidence about originality. Make more work within one constraint. Keep the failures. Compare version ten with version fifty. Let specific preferences become visible through repeated decisions before naming them as a method.

Someone else may still have done something similar. The creator notes the overlap, keeps the useful comparison and begins version fifty-one with the same materials.