Posted: August 27th, 2011 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Ethics, Inspiration | No Comments »
The last thing you want to be accused of as any kind of creative is plagiarism. When your job comes down to delivering original ideas, ripping off others’ is pretty much a career ending practice.
But in photography originality is not a black and white concept. We can legitimately inherit inspiration from every picture we see. And it all has an accumulative effect leading to the creation of great work.
But where do you draw the line? Some people recreate photo concepts they’ve found on a stock library website, right down to the finest details, and call them their own. That’s one way of avoiding the license fee I guess, but misrepresenting the creative ideas of another as your own is an act of theft as plain as any other. And the internet improves the chances of such a plagiarist coming unstuck.
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Posted: July 16th, 2011 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Inspiration | 1 Comment »
I’ve just returned from a few days in Dili, East Timor where my old mate Ashley Roach and I ran some training for local photographers. East Timor’s news industry is in a developmental phase at the moment, with many publications having sprung up in the period since the Indonesians left in 1999. And they all run on the smell of an oily rag.
In a previous life I went there as a soldier, following the Indonesian rampage in the wake of the 1999 independence vote. That trip spanned five months and much of the country, and all the while I carried a Nikon F5 and a couple of boxes of film in my pack. Along the way I met several Australian photographers who would later be instrumental in guiding me into this work. I returned on a couple more occasions after later landing a job as an army photographer.
For Ashley it was a similar story. He spent six months wondering the country with a camera for the army. So in a very real sense, our photographic careers started in East Timor. And that has something to do with the motivation behind our trip there last week.
During the workshop we met nineteen photographers. None of them had the latest or fanciest of equipment. In fact few had SLRs at all, and nobody had more than a couple of lenses to choose from. But what they all had was passion in spades.
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Posted: February 9th, 2011 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Inspiration | 8 Comments »
Annie Leibovitz flew into town this morning to drop by her exhibition, A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005, at the Museum of Contemporary Art and to fulfil some promotional responsibilities (not that this was necessary as the show has been declared the museum’s most popular ticketed event ever).
I got to spend an hour or so this afternoon touring the exhibition with the photographer herself but in that time she could barely scratch the surface. Annecdotes and backstories from the forty year career of a woman who has shot everyone who’s anyone would take a hefty tome to accommodate. I hope that one day she writes it.
Three things Leibovitz said stood out for me in particular.
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Posted: November 9th, 2010 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Back stories, Inspiration | Tags: Backstory, Inspiration | 2 Comments »
Shooting weather is a great leveller for photographers. It’s one area in which you don’t need accreditation and authority to get in, it doesn’t involve expensive travel to get you there, nor does it demand the latest and greatest in cutting-edge equipment for you to have the opportunity to make pictures that are as good as any.
Unlike many other photographic pursuits, you can produce awe-inspiring weather pictures pretty much regardless of your resources. It’s far more a test of your individual vision and skill than your hardware.
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Posted: July 1st, 2010 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Ethics, Inspiration | Tags: Photos 1440, World Press Photo | No Comments »
Today we’re finishing the hanging of prints for a month-long exhibition of the Herald’s best photography from throughout the past year. Called Photos 1440, it’s one of four exhibitions that are part of Canon’s EOS Festival of Photography, and we’re quite thrilled that it’s going to be conducted alongside the Sydney leg of the World Press Photo exhibition world-tour.
With Photos 1440 and the Word Press Photo exhibitions occurring simultaneously in opposite wings of the State Library of New South Wales, the contrast between their respective works is all the more clear and it begs the question: why must World Press Photo be so bloody upsetting all of the time? It’s generally very worthy subject-matter I concede, but surely there’s more of that to be found than is for the most part confined to conflicts and generic misfortune, year after year after year?
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Posted: May 10th, 2010 | Author: Wade | Filed under: General, Inspiration | Tags: Inspiration, Paul Smith | No Comments »
Some creative disciplines might be so far apart it would seem a stretch that they could possibly offer much to one another at all. But if you take the time to break it down, the work of a fashion designer in London could actually have something to offer to a photographer in Sydney, or indeed to creatives anywhere. You just have to be able to recognise it when it presents itself.
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Posted: April 21st, 2010 | Author: Wade | Filed under: Inspiration | Tags: Exhibitions | No Comments »
If you’ve got some spare time over the next two weeks you should drop into King Street Gallery on William and take a look at Kate Geraghty’s exhibition Displaced Futures which is running until 1 May.
On the other side of town, Oculi has a ten-year retrospective at the Manly Art Gallery called Terra Australis Incognita, running through until 16 May. They have also published a very fine book to mark their first decade.
But wait, there’s more.
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