Learning from other photographers

“I’m just in love with making movies. I’m not very fond of movies; I don’t go to them much. I think it’s very harmful for movie makers to see movies because you either imitate them or worry about not imitating them. You should make movies innocently, the way Adam named the animals on the first day in the garden.

I lose my innocence; every time I see a film, I lose something, I don’t gain. I never understand what directors mean when they compliment me, young directors, and say they’ve learned from my films. I don’t believe in learning from other people’s films. You should learn from your own interior vision and discover, as I say, innocently, as though there had never been D.W. Griffith, Eisenstein, Ford, Renoir, or anybody…

Orson Wells

Might this apply to photographers too? Can you imagine being a photographer and not studying other photographers? Going out in the world and imagining that I’ve never seen another’s images - what do I photograph? And why?

True, Orson Wells and his contemporaries had far fewer films to give him inspiration, and these days creative people are often asked, “What, or who, inspires you?” I have a book, Free Play - Improvisation in Life and Art, by Stephen Nachmanovitch, which might shed more light on this. I’ll write a review when I’ve finished reading it.