Maybe you saw the Associated Press photo by John Moore today in your local or regional newspaper. I saw it on the front page of today's
San Francisco Chronicle. It showed Iraqis identified as "Hussein loyalists" who had theirs hands bound behind them and were wearing bags over their heads.
The photograph immediately brought to mind an image I had taken of an
initiation into a club called "The Clampers" in the hills of California's "gold country" in 1994. The men were all hooded with paper bags, but despite a morning enduring mock-humiliation (decorum prevents me from elaborating), they all knew that in the end they'd be treated to a substantial portion of grilled steak and all the beer they could drink.
So after 17 years of photographing for 2 different new spapers, I've seen a good share of "recycled" photos - from other photographers - a s well as my own. By "recycled," I'm talking about photographs or even film sequences that are directly ripped-off from other photos or even works of art. The most shameless example I can think of is a portrait of keyboardist Keith Emerson sitting at a piano framed EXACTLY like Arnold Newman's portrait of
Igor Stravinsky. Or, it can be an homage as Woody Allen did with Edward Hopper's
Nighthawks in his classic film, "Annie Hall."
For me, my "recycled" images have either been coincidental parallels or intentional rip-offs that are usually an homage, inside joke or visual pun. When I worked for the now-defunct Manteca (CA) News, I had an assignment to take photos of a cheerleading camp and recalled photographer Phillipe Halsman's "jump" series, including this one of
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis and tried my own version of this with about
80 girls, aged from 6 to 13 years old.
Other times, it can be amazing how close p hotographs can become visually that span decades of time, as I discovered in this
photo I did in 1977 of an Escalon, CA manufacturing site that closely re s embles this
photograph by Margaret Bourke-White taken in 1936.
In Ruth Orkin's signature photo, "
American Girl in Italy, 1951," the lass is obviously despairing as she hurries to walk past the gazes and comments of a leering group of Italian men. But in my photograph, taken at a lowrider car show in St ockton, California in 1989, the young Chicano men's leers don't seem to be affecting the
winner of a "best legs" contest in the very least.
So, several of my fellow photojournalists and I know that we have images in our memory banks to pull "off the shelf" if we need them, and every year or so when we are assigned to such mundane events as tree plantings, for example, we can recall the
raising of the flag on Iwo Jima and make a visual equivalent that pays homage to the original iconic image.
After all, it was none other than Pablo Picasso who said, "Good artists borrow, great artists steal."""
Posted by: Adrian / 7:37 PM
permalink
