Thoughts on Copying
I had a situation a little while back when I learned of someone plagiarising me. It’s happened to me several times but on this occasion it was so blatant I had to act. I was annoyed, but I took a few days before responding.
My first thought was to vent my annoyance but as the days wore on, I thought I might try to gently suggest how to progress beyond imitating others. I sent a quick email and I discussed how copying is fine if done correctly and used as a learning device.
I pointed out to the plagiarist the jazz musician Clark Terry and how he used the framework of imitate, assimilate, innovate when teaching his students. They would begin by copying the masters so the techniques and ideas in the work would seep into the students subconscious. After some time, Terry would then gently nudge students to move beyond copying and encouraged them to incorporate the ideas and lessons learned to create their own work. The result would be a blend from the people they had borrowed from plus their own ideas and innovations, resulting in original work.
Austin Kleon dedicated a whole book to the subject of copying, titled Steal Like and Artist and this section really struck a chord with me:
I realised how I’d been influenced by many people in my work, for instance as a young teenager I would watch art documentaries, and in one I came across the work of the New York artist, Chuck Close. His work was buried in my subconscious and years later surfaced in photographs such as the one below.
Patrick from All The Rage.
Copying Yourself
The cosy and familiar slippers of copying your own ideas and previous work is an easy trap to fall into, and it’s something I’m really wary of. As soon as I find that I’m rehashing ideas, I tend to run in the opposite direction and do something completely different. For instance, following my project about my family and the Covid pandemic in which the work was dark and monochrome, I decided to do a complete u-turn and started to shoot colour portraits on film (tricky for someone heavily colourblind). That reinvigorated a project I had been working on many years, resulting in this.
Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others — Pablo Picasso
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