Hugh Hamilton

I was once a great buyer of photographic books, which I would pore over obsessively trying to find the secrets of their images. If something caught my eye I had to have it - and one of the consequences was that my personal work bounced around as it absorbed bits of this and that. The other consequence was that I own several hundred very large, very beautiful books.

My friend Geoff McGeachin, after years of being a photographer, changed course when he wrote a thriller and became an author. Around the time of his second book (he has five out now, buy them - they’re funny!) I had read something great I wanted to share with him, but I had just begun to start the conversation when he held up his hands. “I’ve stopped reading,” he said. “I don’t want to be influenced.”

At the time that kind of floored me, because while I can see his point, how do you keep up with what’s going on? In the modern world it is absolutely essential to stay abreast of what’s working out there. What are people buying? What is selling? What do they want to see/hear/read? Every few years, when an exceptional talent arrives, you can see the influence spread through this, or any, industry like ripples in a pond. It happened with Bailey and Avedon way back when, then with Lachapelle in the nineties and so on and so on. Photographers like what they see and it starts to show up in their imagery and before you know it it has become part of the landscape. No one starts with a blank slate, and they probably haven’t since Mr Kodak invented the box brownie. But how do you escape the influence? Or at least, take it from it what works for you and come back with something thats yours rather than just an echo, or shadow, of someone else’s talent.

Two pieces of advice from the same man, Alexey Brodovitch, one of the great art directors of the last century (he’s the guy that filled magazines with lots of white space - he was also the first to create layouts that flowed. He would lay pages out on the floor and sequence them until he felt they produced something more than the sum of their parts).

“If you look in your camera and see something you’ve seen before, don’t click the shutter.”

That he said to the young Hiro, who then took two years to come up with a photo of a shoe that satisfied the Brodovitch eye. For years those words haunted me as I failed at originality - my work was deeply influenced by whatever was fashionable at the time, in part by clients who would ask for the ‘Lachapelle’ look (or whoever had caught their eye that month) and I would try to make them happy, and in part by my own insecurity.
The other Brodovitch advice I cannot quote exactly - I don’t even know who it was said to. I read it a long time ago in a film magazine but it stuck in my head because it seems to be the total opposite of what he said above. It was in an interview with a film director who had once been a photographer and who had attended Brodovitch’s famous Design Laboratory. If he felt he had no voice of his own, Brodovitch told the young man, then he should adopt someone’s else’s voice and inhabit that. Shoot everything as he felt the other would. If you have a voice of your own, in time, it will emerge.

Although this seems to completely contradict the first advice, it doesn’t really. The truth is that each of us must find our own way. How we do it is up to us and who we are - the map is different for each of us and we must find it ourselves. If you have the destination in mind you will find it somehow.

Last year Dan Winters published his first monograph. Dan is an astonishing photographer whose work I have admired for over ten years. He’s also notable amongst photographers for handing in one picture when he shoots an assignment. This is virtually unheard of. the art director never sees anything but what Dan wants. And the pictures are always stunning. Truly unique portraiture.  I have been picking up the book and looking at it for a few months now and I keep putting it down and walking away. I was thinking about that the other day and I realized I haven’t bought a photo book in quite a while now.
And that made me realise that I know who I am now, I know what I shoot. I’m no longer trying to be somebody else. I’m finally happy with what I get when I click the shutter. Its been a long journey and I got a great library out of it, but I have a feeling the library isn’t going to grow much in the next few years.