We’ve all been beginners one day. And we’ve all been criticised for creating cliché photographs. The implication is that clichés shows a failure of originality, something to get rid of as quickly as possible because it’s not interesting, it’s already done to death. The implication is wrong.
When I learned photography, I had no plan because I knew nothing. I didn’t even know what aperture was. I looked at a lot of photos and decided on a number of things I liked. A lot of those were photos that would be considered clichés today, and probably already were at the time. But I saw something I liked, I tried to reproduce it to learn how it’s made.
To recreate a photo you like to can’t just copy it. That’s not a thing unless you use a photocopier and you put your name on someone else’s photograph. To reproduce a photo you have to understand what makes it work. For example, a photo of a foggy landscape with a lone tree in silhouette on a hill is about balancing a difficult to expose scene (fog can be a real pain to get right, like snow), framing the tree in exactly the right spot in the frame, and balancing the tones to make it a pleasant image. In the end, if you do it well, you have a cliché.
Being success in reproducing clichés requires an analytical approach that teaches you the mechanisms of that image and why it was successful enough to become a cliché. Consciously or not, you have to develop the tools that will make you understand what makes that image what it is.
Over time, you essentially build an internal model of what photography is. The same way weapon development doesn’t need to detonate a nuclear bomb to understand whether it works because very accurate models have been developed over time that make it unnecessary, each reproduction of a cliché photo refines your understanding of the mechanisms that lead to their original creation. After enough iterations, you stop needing to experiment to reach your goal because your internal simulations, learned from reproducing clichés, already have the answers.
It’s a slow loop: find an image you like and you don’t really understand, try to reproduce it, fail, analyse, close the gap, try again, fail, analyse why, get closer to your goal, until you understand its mechanisms and you’re close enough to have recreated the cliché. Eventually, you lose interest in the original and you move on to another photograph.
Clichés are clichés because they were very successful. Any random photo can’t become a cliché, it just disappears in the billions of photos taken every day. Clichés have value before they’re branded as uninteresting clichés and that’s why it is interesting to learn from them.
Clichés are only a problem when you treat them like a destination, which is what only bad photographers on IG do. They manage to reproduce the current trend and they present it to the world as an achievement. Managing to reproduce one is not something to be praised for. Many people have done so before you. Clichés are only a milestone on your learning process. They’re there to be passed and surpassed.
When you’ve outgrown the clichés, the reference disappears. You’re no longer trying to reproduce what someone else has created before you, an effect that was discovered by another photographer. You look at a scene, build an understanding of what it is, and use your knowledge acquired from reproducing clichés to create your own approach to the scene. You know what you need to do.
In a way clichés are stabilisers on a kid’s bicycle: you need to learn from them, but then learn to get rid of them.
#Photography #Opinion #IMayBeWrong #Clichés