Do you ever stop to think about who your influences are as an artist? I wonder if I do this more than most photographers I know personally, since the question of one’s lineage has been rejected by some as not how they operate. As for me, I’ve never set the topic aside.
I think all photographers have a lineage and are influenced not only by other photographers, but by (I hope) literature, philosophy, science, movies, anthropology, history, economics, family, personal experiences, and, of course, arts different from photography.
R.B. Kitaj. Western Bathers.
Painters are famous for talking about their influences. R. B. Kitaj has spoken and written frequently about the Venetian colorists of the Renaissance, about poets and writers, the larger Jewish experience, and about his main master, Cézanne. Anselm Kiefer has likewise been effusive in discussing the Kabbalah and Merkabah of Jewish mysticism, alchemy, World War II, the holocaust, and the poet Paul Celan, along with the formative influence of artists like Joseph Beuys.
Anselm Kiefer. Für Paul Celan.
I’m a bit curious why I don’t read more photographers talking about their influences. Maybe, first off, that’s because far fewer photographers write than the painters of the same era—whichever era you choose. I wonder if photographers see their work as a conversation with art the way many painters and sculptors do. Meanwhile, most artist’s statements by photographers don’t refer to art history or the continuum of artistic concerns so much as to their personal lives and issues of politics, identity, and their self. (Ah, the all-important self.) As well as the story their work is telling and exactly how we should see it.
Charlie Simokaitis. from The Crisis Tapes.
At the artist’s talk given by Charlie Simokaitis during Filter Photo Festival last week, I found myself confessing an influence. I was asking Charlie questions during the Q&A and next thing I know I’m telling him how much his work has affected my own over the years—something I’ve only recognized in the last few months.
The poet Robert Duncan, one of the most distinct and inventive poets of the 20th century, used to call himself a derivative poet. He published a two-volume collection of poems that is actually titled Derivations. He freely called out his lineage and the influences that had informed his poetry over his lifetime.
Coral polyps.
This reminds me of a concept in Zen Buddhism of “dependent co-arising.” It pre-supposes that, even though we experience ourselves as individuals, none of us are actually independent individual entities, but that this belief is actually a cause of much suffering. When we see ourselves as a separate, isolated individual positioned against the world. we are deluded, the theory goes. And, of course, terribly anxious and protective. What the alternative concept proposes is that we are all arising together, dependent on one another utterly for our existence. My mind conjures an image of a colony of coral or recalls Deleuze & Guattari’s concept of the rhizome.
Tod Papageorge.
I don’t presently see a purpose in listing my own personal influences at the moment, since that seems rather self-centered. (Although I’m thinking about them.) But you get the idea. Maybe it’s useful to look at your own influences. And maybe, if you don’t find that many, it might steer you towards locating more artists and thinkers and writers in whom you find delight. As Tod Papageorge said, rephrasing Robert Capa’s famous dictum, “If your pictures aren’t good enough you’re not reading enough.” Or looking, perhaps, at enough art.