Originality or Quality?

[Justin Silber]

There have been quite a few threads on the subject of originality in art lately, and it is quite common in other forms of art to focus on originality. One comment that I've been thinking about went something to effect of, "Your work is technically very good and shows a strong connection to early to mid 20th century photographers of the Group f/64 type, but this connection makes it highly derivative." Is derivative a bad thing? How can what we do not be derived in any way from the past?

In my opinion it is important for a work to be technically excellent, in addition to original, for it to be a "good" work of art. This opens many doors of uncertainty regarding technical quality. With photography, is sharpness a sign of technical quality? Not necessarily, many beautiful and emotionally impactful photographs are not in sharp focus. Composition? I think most would agree that good composition is critical, but how do you define it short of "I know it when I see it"? With representational art composition is fairly easy to judge but I struggle when it comes to highly abstract work such as Jackson Pollock. Archival stability may also be a consideration, but sometimes it is the instability that is a part of the art. I recall hearing of a photography exhibit in which the photographs were intentionally fixed poorly and the degradation of the image was an integral part of the art.

Another problem is just how original is it necessary to be in order to be called original? Is possible to make an original work involving fruit, since there have been countless works of art involving fruit? People and the natural world have been a part of art since pre-historic antiquity, can any work involving them be considered truly original? One could even break it down to the medium or technique, and say that all works involving currently existing media or techniques are derivatives of the first. Would it matter to you if a work was undeniably original but had no other redeeming or evocative qualities? Could you still call it art? I'm thinking of the the "Definition of Art" animation in which the first response was along the lines of, "Art is anything anyone does that evokes an emotional response from someone, even animals."

There are a lot of questions in this post, but my most basic question are how important do you consider originality in your photography, or art in general? Beyond that, how original do you have to be to be original, and how does the quality of the work impact originality?

FWIW, the simple version of my own current view is that I would rather produce excellent photography in a derivative manner, but with a distinct sense of "me" about them rather than create poor work in which I do not get a sense of myself that came about as a result of trying to be original, or may actually be original. But in the end that statement only raises more questions.

- Justin

[Ed Sukach]

It will be interesting to read the responses here.

As for me ... I really don't worry about "originality". I don't intentionallly copy the works of others ... but with an average "pre-conscious" (wild guess!) at work, certain elements from others works MAY be there.

My "creative process"? ... more or less a collection of Freudian "Pensees" -- "voiceless thoughts". I try to avoid analyzing - at least extensive over-analyzing, and ... and.... just "DO IT".

Once in a while I get a good image. Uh, yeh... defined as "working for me".. That happens frequently enough to make it all worth while.

[frank]

Sounds to me like the critic who was commenting on your work was just looking for a way to keep you down and for him to appear superior. A lot af art criticism is pure bs.

[CPorter]

As for me, I concentrate on the quality of my photography mostly because I believe it central to any presentation of photographic art, I want it to be a technical achievement on my part as well, I want it to be what was in my mind before I exosed the film, regardless of the subject matter.

The originality part will just have to come as it comes. I sometimes see photographs where it seems to me that someone is striving to be so original and the whole concept comes across as, well, not good. But that's just my take on it.

[Justin Silber]

Just to point out, it wasn't a comment on my own work, it was another APUGers. Mine has a little ways to go before I would call it derivative of AA or EW

[erikg]

I think that it sounds like your critic was seeing too much Ansel or Weston in your work and not enough Justin. Maybe he wasn't looking hard enough, and it certainly is common for critics to use classification as a substitute for actual insight and analysis. You say you want to produce work with a distinct sense of yourself. I would say that that is a good track to be on and to keep working at it. Perhaps it isn't as obvious as you might think. I would encourage you to get more opinions. I don't think one can be successful or satisfied "trying" to be original. If you pursue your own voice, you will be original enough. Monet, who was a pretty sharp businessman about his art, believed that he should move one or two steps forward with each new body of work, as opposed to moving ten or twenty steps. But by that point he had pretty firmly established his own voice with his audience.

[Michel Hardy-Vallée]

Originality in art was "invented" recently, and matters only within certain cultural norms.

Middle-Age painters were not trying to be original, they were trying to be faithful to their tradition. You could try to vary the approach depending on the subject, but to be astonishingly different was not a virtue.

There are many stories in art history regarding the source of the "originality as an end" attitude in Western art. Some say it started at the Renaissance, with successful and idiosyncratic artists such as Michel-Ange and Da Vinci, others say it comes a little later with the Enlightenment and the subsequent Industrial Revolution that created an autonomous market for art.

In French, we mock disingenuous originality with the expression épater le bourgeois, to startle the middle-class. In other words, the middle class is a blind consumer of originality because its whole point in life is to be different from the vile proletariat or the turgid aristocracy...

But Marxist considerations aside, there is some hypocrisy to the dictatorship of originality.

Let's face it, how many more series of deadpan people do we need to see being hailed as the second coming of a "fresh outlook on life" ?

Many contemporary artists praised for their originality (e.g. Alec Soth...) are also extremely derivative of the currents in which they navigate. Soth could not exist without Shore and Eggleston before him, and these two do could not exist without Walker Evans, who himself does not exist without Eugène Atget, who...

I don't mind people working "in the tradition of...", but it's impossible to do so with a straight face in our current culture because you will always end up looking derivative. "Derivative" is a concept that only makes sense when there is a pretension to originality; the f64 group pretended to be original, so emulating them is inevitably derivative. And given that everybody is trying to be original, if you do stuff that vaguely looks like someone else's, you better be ready to invent a claim to originality for fear of looking too derivative.

Miniature painting in the Middle Ages never pretended to be original, so calling "derivative" the work of any of the nameless monks who illustrated countless Bible manuscripts is egregious.

The obsession with épater le bourgeois has killed the possibility of a tradition. Alec Soth does very good work, but he does so in a tradition of late 20th century deadpan colour photography. Nothing wrong with that. But when you read criticism about his work, it's as if he's a whole unique movement by himself. And maybe that's where the problem is: if we must have originality to the extreme, then there is no such thing as school, a movement, only individuals. Individuals are never that different from each other, but we like to believe so because we like to believe in the Artist-Hero, the Lone Ranger who liberates Art from the clutches of boredom.

"Working in the tradition of..." is a qualifier left for the amateur, the weekend artist, or the so-called retired accountants that are supposedly swarming APUG (no they're not!). It's a way of creating a two-tier system of "real" artists who are doing work as derivative as the amateurs, but who can do so in total impunity with the help of critics.

I'm exaggerating, but there's a fine line between crappy-artist and crappy-amateur, often drawn in critical discourse.

[MurrayMinchin]

Hey! That biting critique sounds like one I got a little while ago;

I am sure you will agree that your work is clearly influenced by the LF greats of the past and does not evidence a strong personal style. You have of course not created this work with any commercial intention, but I have no doubt you will have gathered from APUG discussions and elsewhere that this type of work is in very little demand, not least because of the collossal oversupply of material. Your work is excellent - and yet still that of a untrained amateur with little or no reputation or achievement.

You really have to look at the person who gives the critique, and weigh their capacity to critique your work in the first place. In the case of the person who made the comment above, well, his interpretation of my photographs was obscured by the swirling mists of his dizzyingly narcissistic vantage point. Water off a ducks back

Originally Posted by Justin Silber

I would rather produce excellent photography in a derivative manner, but with a distinct sense of "me" about them rather than create poor work in which I do not get a sense of myself that came about as a result of trying to be original, or may actually be original.

I'm going to put that with my collection of quotes on my darkroom door!

Murray

[Justin Silber]

That critique of your work was exactly the one I was thinking of, Murray!

[bjorke]

Originally Posted by MurrayMinchin

This is exactly the attitude that a gallery SALES person should have, unless the gallery caters to the "looks nice over the sofa" crowd, in which case then they will care a lot about high technical polish combined with rapid production and low production costs.

Artists depend on gallerists to handle "all that business crap" and then whine when gallerists act like businesspeople.

*sigh*