Does Originality Matter?

“A good photograph is knowing where to stand.” - Ansel Adams

Have you ever found yourself fretting about whether your work is “original” enough? In the minds of most people, it seems, “originality” or “novelty” is absolutely central to art. Indeed, for many, it is simply assumed that if some work is not “original” – if it is “derivative” or has been “done before” – it lacks real artistic merit. It is not really art at all. Moreover, to characterise a work as “highly original” is itself to issue praise, quite apart from any other aspects of the work. I think that there is something wrong in such ideas, or at least confused and ambiguous.

The claim I wish to challenge most directly is that something can count as art only to the extent that it is “original” – the “unoriginal” or the “derivative” having no real artistic value simply in virtue of its unoriginality. I would contend that this view is grounded in ambiguity and misunderstanding.

I know of at least one rightly acclaimed photographer for whom so central is the notion of originality to their artistic projects that they deliberately avoid looking at the photographic work of others for fear that it will pollute their own artistic vision. For them, even to take inspiration from the work of another photographer is to have (or to risk having) their own artistic vision contaminated or clouded. In my view, such “photographic celibacy” (their term) is not only misplaced, but actually hinders artistic self-expression. Exactly how it hinders artistic self-expression I will leave for another blog. For now, I will content myself with unpacking the notion of “originality” and explaining why I think its centrality to the very idea of art is misplaced.

Most people, I suspect, have no clear idea what they mean by “originality” when they make aesthetic judgements based upon it. Yes, most people will say that for something to be original it needs to be “new” and “not having been done before”. But what does that mean? Let’s dig a bit deeper.

To begin with, there are at least two dimensions to the meaning of the word, each of which is usually (or at least very often) left ambiguous. On the one hand, there is the aspect of a work – its style, its use of colour, its form, its techniques, its subject, its composition, etc. Which aspect or aspects is to be taken as most central to assessment of its originality? And on the other hand there is ambiguity concerning the domain against which originality is being assessed, for any given aspect. Are we assessing originality with respect to the entire history of art or with respect to some narrower domain?

To make this a bit clearer, let me give a couple of examples. I know I am not alone, after seeing some amazing photograph taken by some amazing photographer, in wanting to go to wherever the photograph was taken and capture for myself something similar. On my first dedicated photography trip I went to Yosemite Valley in winter, and being a huge admirer of the photography of Ansel Adams (a framed print of his Mt. McKinley and Wonder Lake took pride of place in my home for decades). I was familiar with his famous image of storm showers passing through the valley as seen from Tunnel View. And so, of course, I went to Tunnel View and stood where Adams stood and pressed the shutter. My hope was to come back with an image more or less like Adams’ – and hopefully something that looked equally good. Complete folly, of course! I didn’t have the storms passing through, nor his spectacular light, and most importantly, neither did I have (nor do have!) his artistic genius. The resulting image was, perhaps predictably, rather “meh”. So it turns out, when Adams said that “A good photograph is knowing where to stand”, he was either being ironic, coy, or was just plain wrong. Of course where you stand matters (which may have been his point), but there is a lot more to a good photograph than knowing where to stand – dammit!

In any case, no one, I suspect, would rank my image as in any way “original”. But hold on a second. The composition may have been similar or even (let’s suppose) identical to Adam’s famous image, but the light, the time of day, the time of year, the weather conditions, the environment – all of that was different. Indeed, in its totality, it was a unique image that I captured – as unique as the one Adams captured. Nowhere near as good – I’ll readily grant that – but no less unique. No one, in the entire history of photography has or ever will capture my image. And none of this even brings in to play the fact that what I was trying to capture was my experience of the scene before me. My point is not to claim that my image was original or had any artistic merit, but that we cannot judge the originality of a photograph without first identifying, whether implicitly or explicitly, some aspect or set of aspects that we consider to be important, whilst disregarding other aspects. It may be original in some aspects, but unoriginal in others. Which aspects matter for assessing an image’s artistic merit is very often left unclear.

For that image I was more or less consciously attempting to produce something at least similar to someone else’s image - an image I had seen and long admired. But on the same trip I took another image, this time of Half-dome in the fading winter light. The previous day I had observed how the light fell across the face of Half-dome and had figured out a good vantage point. I could see the light from the setting sun starting to scrape across its famous vertical face, drawing out its subtler contours beautifully, even casting the shadow of a ridge containing a tree onto its face. When everything seemed optimum, I pressed the shutter.

Many months later, well after returning home, I came across Adams’ image, Moon and Half-dome, and suddenly realised how remarkably similar it was to the image I had taken. Yes, my image had a tighter crop, was not from quite the same location, and, alas, lacked a moon, but in every other aspect – the approximate time of year, the angle of sun, the distribution of snow, timing, the shadows – even the tree – they were incredibly similar. I would go so far as to say that if you photoshopped my image of Half-dome and placed it into Adams’ image (mine had the narrow crop), you’d struggle to spot the differences. Now, I know that I had seen that image before, but I equally know that Adams’ image was nowhere on my mind as I chose my composition and responded to the scene before me. Consciously, at least, I was creating my own original image, not trying to mimic or reproduce one of Adams’ images. But was my image “original” in any sense relevant to its artistic merit? The point is that quite apart from any degree of similarity in its aspects, something can be original with respect to one domain but unoriginal with respect to a broader domain. “Industrial strength” originality is original in a global sense. No one having produced something like that before. Adams’ image was (I’m going to suppose for the moment – see below) globally original, but my image, whatever was going on in my conscious (or for that matter unconscious) mind, was not globally original. But at the same time my image was locally or individually original in the sense that no one else’s work played any conscious role in any of the decisions I made in the creation of the image. The image I created was, in that sense, entirely original and new to me. It was created of myself and for myself without any conscious direction from Ansel Adams or anyone else.

This brings me to my final issue with originality, for I believe that global originality is irrelevant to whether a work counts as art (though I put to one side its role in the assessment of the artist.) Partly, this is due to the fact that the number of works that might count as globally original is vanishingly small. Every artist – even great artists – “draw inspiration” from other artists whose works they will have encountered or even copied. Many great works of art, by equally great artists, are the artists’ own individual takes on compositions and themes of earlier artists. Pablo Picasso, for example, took inspiration from El Greco, reproducing – in his own style, of course – some of the latter’s compositions more or less explicitly. Were those works not art?

Clearly, we want our photographic art to be an expression of our true authentic self, but what is rarely considered is the fact that our true authentic self is profoundly shaped by our life: our loves and experiences and relationships and class and culture and family and… the list is endless. Amongst those influences are the images we have seen and captured our attention. They contribute to the aesthetic dimension of who we are and so also contribute to what or how we seek to express our selves through our creative work. If noting this is taken to undermine the belief or hope that any of our work is globally original, so be it. But let this observation not dent our sense of individuality nor our capacity for authentic artistic self-expression. For the works of others come to influence or inspire us only because something already within us responds to those works! We can only be influenced by those works that sing to some aspect of our soul. In other words, whatever echoes of those works may be found in our own work is as much a result of who we authentically are when we encounter those works as who we become as a result of our encountering of those works. If, say, the influence of the photography of Anselm Adams appears in my own work, it does not impugn the authenticity of my own work, nor its credentials as creative acts of authentic self-expression, for Adams’ work can come to influence me only because and to the extent that his work resonates with the individual self that is (or was) me. Such influence or inspiration becomes, at most, the conduit for self-expression by revealing to us some hitherto unnoticed aspect of our aesthetic selves, not the death of it, as some seem to suppose. The view of the artist as some kind of pure unadulterated originating source of their art, whose works emerge ex nihilo from their authentic self is, in my view, a myth. We are all of us “created” – as it were, “derived” – from our past and our circumstances just as much as we create our lives through every act, decision, or choice. Similarly, all art is, in some sense, “derivative” of what has gone before, whilst at the same time being acts of authentic self-expression.

So does our work need to be “original” or “novel” to count as art? It seems to me that this is the wrong question to ask. The right (or at least better) question to ask is this: Are we giving aesthetic expression to our authentic selves? Don’t worry about whether you are being original - just express yourself as clearly and beautifully as you can through your work.