We hear this a lot, and we feel it when standing before one of those iconic scenes unable to be creative in the face of what everyone else has done.
But I conducted an experiment to test the notion. I went to Google Images and searched on "Delicate Arch". In 36 pages of images, two things were true:
1. I didn't see any two photographs that really looked the same, and
2. My online photograph of Delicate Arch wasn't in those first 36 pages.
The photos coming up in that search were sufficiently varied that I was able to ascertain both of those facts within several minutes.
I narrowed the search to "Delicate Arch Sunset", and my own photo (which is titled "delicate_arch_at_sunset.jpg" or something like that still did not appear in the first 36 pages. And even limiting the photos of Delicate Arch to those made at sunset didn't impose enough sameness to make it hard to see the infinite variety.
I had to add my own name (Delicate Arch Rick) for my photo to appear in the first page.
That tells me there are thousands and thousands of images of Delicate Arch on the Internet. Yet all of them that I saw were different. Some of those photos were highly stylized, some heavily manipulated, and some straight out of the camera. Some made me laugh, some made me long for a trip back to Utah, and others were just dreadful. Some said something profound, and others were mundane. But none of them were duplicates.
About a hundred years ago, the composers of music started to get the notion that after about 300 years of exploration, there was nothing left to be said about the major and minor tonal scales. I enjoy the direction some of them went, some in total rebellion against the notion of tonality. But I don't think they were right.
That accusation of being derivative is really just something sophisticates say to demonstrate their sophistication. (I know that's why I've said it.) "John Williams is derivative of Gustave Holst" gets said a lot in musical circles. But I really think most of them say it because John Williams has made a zillion dollars doing what most of them can't make a living doing, or because he did it for money and not for "art". We too often revere innovation above beauty, but in looking at the art hanging on the walls of just regular people, beauty gets a lot more respect than innovation. We can call them low-brows if we want, I suppose. But to my thinking it's a big world, and they are the bigger part of it.
Let us not give up on nature, or on searching for our personal view of it. Yes, we should study what has been done so as to avoid quoting someone by accident. But I think making an image just like someone else's is actually rather difficult to do in the end. Nature just presents too many variations, as do the people who experience it. If we are true to our view of nature, the variations will emerge.
Rick "happy to capture mere beauty" Denney
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