In 2018, I took this photograph of a skateboarder in Prague.
I remember liking the way his body stretched across the empty sky. His arms, the bent knees, the small figures behind him. It was one of those moments that came together quickly.
But I already knew another photograph.
Elliott Erwitt1 had photographed a man jumping in front of the Eiffel Tower almost thirty years earlier
I can’t tell you whether I was thinking about Erwitt when I pressed the shutter. I probably wasn’t. But I knew his photograph well. Put the two pictures next to each other and the resemblance is hard to miss.
Once I noticed it, I started wondering what had actually happened. Had I borrowed something without even noticing? And if I had, was that necessarily a problem?
The more I thought about it, the less useful the usual advice seemed: be inspired, but don’t copy.
What does that actually mean?
It made me think of a conversation I had with Rebecca Norris Webb2.
Her father had been a country doctor in Indiana and years later, while studying photography in New York, she came across W. Eugene Smith’s Country Doctor, a photo essay following a rural doctor in Colorado3.
Norris Webb began wondering what that story might look like if it were photographed by a woman who was also a country doctor’s daughter.
That question eventually became Night Calls.
What interests me is what she borrowed from Smith. It wasn’t the photographs. Country Doctor gave Norris Webb something she could make her own.
She spent the next six years retracing the routes of her father’s house calls through Rush County, Indiana. She photographed former patients and their descendants, but gradually found herself working more and more at night and in the early morning. Those were the hours when her father had often been called away for births, deaths, accidents, and emergencies.
Norris Webb had studied poetry before photography, and writing also found its way into the project. She began creating what she describes as a series of letters to her father. Photography became mixed with memory, landscape, family history, and grief.
None of that came from Smith.
Smith was still there somewhere at the beginning of all this. But the further Norris Webb followed the question, the less useful his answer became.
She had borrowed the starting point, not the destination.
What I like about this is that it suggests we don’t necessarily have to turn away from the photographs that stay with us. Maybe we need to look at them more closely and ask what exactly stayed.
For a moment, I thought this gave me a neat answer to my own photograph.
Borrow the question, not the photograph.
Except that doesn’t quite work either.
Liam Wong4 did almost the opposite with TO:KY:OO.
I mean, he literally told me:
“I would spend nights trying different approaches and mimicking images I would find online, or from my favourite photographers. Composition, texture and depth from Saul Leiter, the verticality of Fan Ho or the rhythm of Christopher Doyle.”
Wong was actively trying to reproduce parts of the photographs he admired. And it was helping him learn.
What I find interesting is how specific he was about it. He wasn’t trying to become the next Saul Leiter5. He was looking at smaller things inside the photographs: depth, texture, composition. From Fan Ho6, it was verticality. From Christopher Doyle, rhythm.
Wong described it to me as breaking the work that influences you into individual components and trying to recreate them.
Recreating those individual elements was a way for Wong to understand them.
That part could then be combined with everything else he was bringing to his own work.
His background in game design mattered here too. So did cinema, graphic design, animation, and the cities he photographed. Over time, those influences became mixed together rather than pointing back to a single source.
Wong made me reconsider the conclusion I had reached with Norris Webb. The important difference seemed to be what happened to whatever they borrowed.
Hannah Altman’s We Will Return to You7 pushed that idea somewhere else.
Her starting point wasn’t another photographer. It was Jewish folklore, Yiddish literature, family stories, and traditions passed down through generations.
Altman was interested in the things that kept returning across those stories. Certain symbols, gestures, objects, and ways of telling them. Rather than illustrating the stories themselves, she began pulling out those smaller elements and finding new ways for them to exist in photographs.
She could take something from an old story without retelling the story itself.
In a way, Altman was doing something surprisingly close to Wong. He broke photographs into smaller parts. She did it with stories.
Borrowing wasn’t the problem. Stopping at someone else’s solution was.
Alex Kilbee once told me something during a photo critique8. We were looking at one of my photographs that had been inspired by another image, and he explained why he thought it didn’t work:
“The reason why I don’t think that it works is because it’s not your idea.”
At first, that sounds like the same old warning about copying.
But Kilbee went further. He described once recreating the pose and lighting from a photographer he admired. He could do it technically but the photograph just never felt right to him.
His explanation was simple: he had borrowed someone else’s idea in someone else’s voice.
The problem wasn’t that another photographer had influenced him.
He had recreated the idea, but he hadn’t really done anything with it yet.
And I think that was the answer I had been looking for.
There is nothing wrong with borrowing from work we admire. A question, a composition, a way of using light, even something from a story or a film can become a useful starting point.
The problem starts when we take the answer too.
Which brings me back to my skateboarder.
I don’t know whether Erwitt’s photograph was in my head when I took it. But looking at them together now, I think I know why the resemblance makes me uncomfortable.
I borrowed too much of the answer.
Martin
P.S. I’ve been thinking recently about why some photographers see pictures you might walk straight past.
Looking into it led me somewhere I didn’t expect: what if becoming a better photographer can actually make certain photographs harder to see?
That’s what I’ll explore in the next issue.
Sources and Further Reading
Elliott Erwitt - A selection of Elliott Erwitt’s photography and work on About Photography.
Rebecca Norris Webb, Night Calls - Rebecca Norris Webb discusses Night Calls, the project inspired by her father’s life as a country doctor.
W. Eugene Smith, Country Doctor - A closer look at Smith’s landmark Country Doctor photo essay and the work that later prompted Norris Webb’s question.
Liam Wong, TO:KY:OO - Liam Wong discusses TO:KY:OO, his influences, and how he learned by breaking down and recreating elements of photographs he admired.
Saul Leiter - A closer look at Saul Leiter’s photography, one of the influences Wong describes when discussing composition, texture, and depth.
Fan Ho - A selection of Fan Ho’s photography, whose use of verticality Wong identifies as another influence on his work.
Hannah Altman, We Will Return to You - Hannah Altman discusses We Will Return to You and how Jewish folklore, Yiddish literature, family stories, and inherited traditions entered the project.
Alex Kilbee, Professional Photographer Critiques Your Photos - My conversation with Alex Kilbee about photographic influence, imitation, and why copying another photographer’s idea can leave an image feeling like someone else’s work.
Thanks for those valuable insights! It’s so refreshing to pin point how our photography is an ever constant continuum and conversation between our own personal impulses to produce an image and an ever evolving canon. Very grateful for the references as well.
I enjoyed your thought process. I used to worry about “copying,” but then I came to believe that sincerity trumps originality. When I notice I’ve brought the beauty of someone else’s work into my own, I know that I am learning new ways to see the world. It’s a joyful experience.