Inspiration and influence—these are things I’ve been thinking about lately. Why? Because it’s clear to me that so many new photographers are getting their influence from other photographers on social media. This isn’t always a good thing.
The biggest problem I have with learning photography from social media is that just because a certain influencer is popular doesn’t mean they’re actually a great photographer. So if this is your only source of inspiration, you’re learning how not to be a great photographer!
Actually, many of those doing the influencing aren’t really photographers, in my opinion—they’re content creators who have built up a huge following and get paid by brands to influence you to buy certain products—hardware and software—to create a specific “look.”
“Be Yourself, Everyone Else Is Taken”
Poor Oscar Wilde is probably turning in his grave at what’s going on. Why on earth anyone would want to jump on a trend bandwagon and create images that look like someone else’s would be beyond his comprehension. It’s certainly beyond mine. Scrolling through some social media feeds, so many images look similar—similar color grading, similar focal lengths with shallow depth of field, similar selfie poses at honeypot locations. There’s a large number of uncreative sheep mindlessly following a flock out there.
Showing an interest in specific looks and understanding how they are created is a good thing. You can then go off and create your own interpretation. You can be influenced by it, and other looks and techniques, to curate your own way of approaching your photography. But so many people don’t. They just copy.
Where I Get My Inspiration and Influence
I say “get” rather than “got,” because after many decades of being a photographer, I still get inspired. Despite the popular saying, you can teach an old dog new tricks.
I had the benefit of going to art school to study photography. A huge amount of time was spent studying art history, which, as it turns out, really sharpens our visual literacy. It helps us develop taste, which can lead to developing our own style or preference for a certain visual aesthetic.
Lighting
For me, great photography is all about using impactful lighting to help tell a story. Lighting should be the first place to start when learning photography. And the best place to learn, in my opinion, is to study master painters from the past.
When you look at painters from the Dutch Golden Age, like Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer, or Renaissance painters such as Caravaggio, you can see how they used light to create visual impact and direct the viewer’s eye to emphasize certain subjects and help tell a story. The quality of light used and the resulting colors helped create emotional impact. Great light creates emotive scenes. That was a huge lesson for 19-year-old me.
Composition
After light, the next most important consideration is composition—finding balance and harmony.
One style of art and design that really caught my imagination was the Bauhaus movement, founded in the early 1900s. The idea with Bauhaus was to strip away ornamentation and focus on function over form. It was about minimalism—straight lines and geometric shapes, often using blocks of primary colors. This modernist aesthetic unified art, crafts, and technology.
Since I studied this movement and pioneering photographers like László Moholy-Nagy, I can’t help but notice uninteresting objects and the shapes they create, and how they work with other objects to create well-balanced compositions, even in mundane everyday scenes. Moholy-Nagy was the first photographer to embrace the medium as an art form rather than just a tool to document reality. That’s a big deal.
I talk about this in more detail and share many examples in this video below.
Photographers
I’ve studied some of the photography greats to see how they used the techniques first employed by classic painters. The likes of Yousuf Karsh, Jane Bown, and David Bailey inspired my portraiture—particularly Bailey, with his high-contrast approach to portraiture that was part of the new wave of photography in the 1970s and 1980s, tied in with the very creative and diverse music and fashion scene.
I have very little interest in photographers active on social media and YouTube, although from time to time someone catches my eye. This past year, I discovered the work of Manchester-based Simon Ogden. His street photography is the best out there right now. I can’t think of anyone as creative, experimental, and prolific. He doesn’t have a huge following—at the time of writing this article, he has 1,245 followers on Instagram. It just goes to show that popularity has nothing to do with ability. You can check out his work here.
Punk and a Rebellious Culture
The biggest influence for me has been the culture I was raised in. The late 1970s and early 1980s were an incredible time for a young lad in England. It was tough, it was gritty, but the music scene was incredible. We had punk and a cultural shift toward being anti-establishment and rebellious, which was actually rather fabulous. We had new types of music emerge, with artists experimenting with electronic synthesizers and inventing new genres.
The entire attitude instilled in a young, impressionable lad was “forget the system and how things have been done.” Do what you want to, try things, fail, try again, and have fun doing it. This was the era Richard Branson began building his Virgin empire with a “Screw it, let’s do it!” attitude. That gritty, rough, homemade edge—innovation, experimentation, and self-expression—has been a huge influence, particularly on my black-and-white photography, which tends to have a gritty, contrasty edge to it, most certainly influenced by a lot of music photography from bands like The Sex Pistols, The Clash, and The Stranglers.
Because of this influence, when I see a certain trend—from a location that’s popular to shoot or a certain style of shooting and editing—my first instinct is to rebel against it rather than jump on a bandwagon like a sheep.
Travel
Visiting different countries and seeing how artists there approach their work has been a huge influence. Cultural diversity has most certainly played a huge role in shaping my visual literacy—in particular, European art and design. Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, and Germany all have so much to offer in terms of creative ideas and influence.
Some Thoughts For Seeking Inspiration and Influence
I’ve had many conversations about this, so here’s a list of things I tell people when asked:
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Visit galleries and museums—this is where great art and photography are curated, typically by people who know what they’re doing.
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Study classic painters—the best place to learn about composition and lighting.
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Study design and art movements—learn how pioneers broke the norm and experimented with new ways to communicate.
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Travel to places and embrace different cultures—this opens up entirely new ways of approaching visual communication.
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Seek out books by highly acclaimed photographers—great masters like Saul Leiter, Martin Parr, Vivian Maier, Elliott Erwitt, and Alex Webb, to name but a few.
Sure, look at what other photographers are doing on social media—you can find ideas and inspiration there. But because most people get their inspiration this way—because it’s the easiest way—you’re not necessarily going to develop a look and approach to your photography that will stand out and be different.
Maybe you don’t want to be different. That’s fine, so long as you enjoy your photography. Me though, I like to rebel a little if I can. Everybody doing the same thing is boring to me. John Lydon once said, “Sometimes the most positive thing you can be in a boring society is absolutely negative.” I couldn’t agree more.
