Just as I am rarely alone, despite how far I might venture into the wilderness, I rarely take an original photograph. Sometimes, my photographs are obviously unoriginal (perhaps not entirely cliché but certainly not obscure).
I don’t care if some of my photography looks familiar because other people have been there before me and taken similar photos. In subtle and often overlooked ways, my photo captures a fleeting and irreproducible moment and reflects my particular framing of the scene, just as most previous and subsequent photos will capture fleeting moments and reflect some other photographer’s approach to the scene. And I will always take photos that don’t look so familiar, that reflect my personal eye for something. Such photos tend to work better in collections or as part of a series (see, for example, 52/4).
