Apologies in advance for the long post....
Because by understanding what people have done before you and WHY they did it, you learn how you can perhaps develop and apply your own ideas. You take bits from all different places and create something new. Or perhaps a work that you study inspires an idea of your own.
or you learn to slavishly copy the style of a photographer your lecturer likes in order to do it 'right' - I know not every teacher/lecturer is like that but there are fair few that are, and they turn out little mini mes of themselves.
Yet despite that, artists carry on producing original work.. how is that possible? It's because they constantly expose themselves to as wide a range of inspiration as they possibly can. You absorb this stuff... almost subliminally, and eventually, all these new experiences and things you take on board, weave themselves into something all great photographers have: A style. You can tell a William Eggleston from a Alec Soth, or a Tim Walker from a Mario Testino. However... Soth and Eggleston are primarily documentary photographers, and Walker and Testino are both fashion photographers. That's stage one right there.... getting an original stylistic output that you own. You can't just sit there in a darkened room and dream that up.., you get it from absorbing as much visual imagery as you can and re-appropriating it in a unique way.
Then there's the reasons for producing work. The "why" and "so what" factors. What images say, and why. If you can apply an original style to something engaging, interesting, and challenging then you're by default being creative.
That doesn't happen by working in a vacuum though. You can't develop a style by copying what you see on You Tube... you'll just end up copying what you see on You Tube. Instead, you expose yourself to.... well.. everything. All art.. all creative output. Photography, painting, music, film, poetry... everything.
Ah, that dreaded word,
style. I have a rather difficult relationship with it, probably because of my architectural background and the echoes of the "Batttle of The Styles" (between Classicism and Gothicism) in the nineteenth century.
There's a widely prevalent view that a 'style' is something you gloss over the surface of a created work.
In architecture, it's dressing up a building with classical columns or a 'modern' glass wall; often with the perceived aim of 'fitting in', whatever that may mean. It separates the purpose, meaning, materials and methods of construction of a building from the visual form that results from those things.
In photography, we see questions every day on this and other forums asking how to reproduce the style of some photograph they've seen, often running the image through the mincing machine of Photoshop or Lightroom Actions and squeezing out some Dragan Effect or Colour-Popped sausages at the other end. That is the worst and meanest use of style; the Instagram filter approach that seeks only to make things 'fun' and 'cool'.
The more sophisticated end of that approach will take into account the lighting, composition and subject matter to ape someone like Joe Cornish or Ansel Adams.
We see it also in the design of the tools that we use - 'retro style' cameras that are intended to look like they sprung out of the 1950s; plastic parts coated with a thin film to look like they are made of metal.
The problem with this approach is that it decouples the end result from its context, the reality of
how a picture was taken is somewhat undermined if a filter is applied to a digital image to make it look as if it was shot on C41 film and cross processed in E6 chemicals.
I am not a rigorously intellectual photographer, but I do avoid the use of such things because I feel it undermines the authenticity of the images I create - that rationale has played a small part in the development of my personal style of photography. I use Silver Efex Pro for black and white conversions, but I rarely use the grain emulation features of that software out of recognition that I am working with digital images, not film (I will embrace and use digital noise where it occurs, though, and some of my digital cameras certainly produce what I consider more pleasing noise than others).
So, arriving at your own style of photography should be something more organic and considered than merely copying the work of other photographers that you find attractive (or pushed toward by some bizarre marking scheme). It should be something that derives from you, your experience, your perspectives and the cultural context you work in and the tools you use: from that set of circumstances individual to you, a genuinely creative approach ought to emerge.
To somewhat pull this post back on topic for the thread, and which may partly account for much of what I have written above, I have short tale to tell...
At the beginning of my second year of my degree in Architecture we were set a short project to design a "pavilion to architecture" in the style of an architect of our choosing: one week studying their 'style' and second week to design the pavilion for crit. Fresh from a recent trip to Holland, I was keen to take on the early Modernist Dutch architect, Willem Dudok.
My tutor had other ideas, however, and overruled my choice - tasking me with studying William Lethaby, an architect and theorist of the Arts and Crafts movement and founding Principal of the Central School of Arts and Crafts in London - someone had to do Lethaby, he said.
Lethaby's writings on architecture and design emphasised 'good, honest building' with truth to materials and a co-operative vision of the construction process, with the craftsmen involved in the building participating in its design and decoration. Where he broke with others in the Arts and Crafts (like William Morris) was in accepting machine made things, since it was economically impossible for the modern world to be built with only hand-made things.
William Morris said:
Machinework should show quite frankly that it is the child of the machine; it is the pretence and subterfuge of most machine-made things which make them disgusting
There is an underlying theme in much of Lethaby's writings that things should be true to their time, their place and their means of production.
Anyhow, having had week studying Lethaby's writings and work, I arrived at the conclusion that for me to design a pavilion to architecture in the 'style' of Lethaby (as the brief demanded) would run contrary to the thought processes of the man I was supposed to be emulating.
In the end I did not turn in a design project, but instead submitted a several thousand word essay exploring why I could not meet the requirements of the brief I had been given.
I found out much later that I had caused something of a ruckus between several members of the teaching staff by doing this - there were quite a number who wanted to fail me for not submitting the required design, but they were ultimately overruled by the Professor of Design, Alan Lipman, since he judged I was one of the few people who had fully embraced the ideas I was supposed to be studying.
Alan was one of those people who challenged you to think about
every aspect of what you were designing, from its social and political context down to how you would deal with the smells of people's farts in a room: he was sometimes very robust in this, but his challenges forced you to think clearly for yourself and create designs for which you could defend every choice you had made. To keep up, I found myself reading books on fields far removed from architecture such as philosophy, linguistics, mathematics and psychology and that reading allowed me to imagine things of which I had never conceived before.
That taught me how to create, and for that I am immensely grateful to him.
