I know what you mean, though in my case I look at a lot of photographs, but generally in genres I don't usually attempt. Mind you, I do sometimes wonder if my cat pictures have been influenced by Jane Bown's book of cat pics which I bought for a friend, but had a leaf through before I passed it on to her. Usually, my 'influences' are an attempt to put my own spin on approaches I've seen. Well, the ones I'm conscious of...
It's hard to know the line between loving someone's work and knowing whether they influenced your own. I love Saul Leiter, but I didn't know I was going that way until someone mentioned it. It was only after that that I found his work and loved it. The same happened with early close up flower pictures I did. I remember someone comparing them with Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. I've always liked the darker side of early European work and their later stuff too, although even then, some can be a bit too way-out for me. I guess I feel an emotional draw with a lot of dark or images you have to really look at and study and get to know. I suppose that''s why my teeth grind at in your face sunsets and ubiquitous landscapes or seascapes. I need a bit of mystery to draw me in. Here's 'my' Josef Sudek view of life. View attachment 101264
Influences?? I don't really know. Photographers? No. I have however been to a lot of art exhibitions and of course I see what the other members of the two art societies I belong to get to hang up in the galleries. There are apparently slight hints of painters in a few photos: Slightly Turner-ish? Slightly Rothko-ish? A friend looked at this and said," Lionel Feininger?" As far as I'm concerned I produce the images I want to in the way I want to. Any hints of subliminal influences from other artists are flooks. No doubt someone could go through my abstracts and find, for example, hints of Gerhart Richter, Mondrian and so on! It occurs to me that, a few years ago, Fen was on a Rothko trip - or am I confusing him with someone else? Lynn
I did this one some time ago, as a bit of a joke. Sit by SteveH, on Flickr The style does remind me of someone, so I feel it was influenced by someone, but I can't figure out who. Any ideas?
Gosh is it time for this thread again? Terrible attacks of deja vu, we posted all this not long ago didn't we?
Did we? I vaguely remember some discussion on impressionism but not anything broader based. Impressionism sticks in my mind because I had actually heard of it. It left an impression you might say.
I'd like to mention Alvin Langdon Coburn here. It's a pity that, when he renounced photography, he destroyed all his negatives, most of the prints from them that he could get his hands on and his special lens attachments. What 'influences' me though is what he wrote about abstraction and, by extension, photographic art: "Why shouldn't the camera cast off the shackles of objective depiction and try something new and untested? Why should we always make mundane pictures of everyday scenes which we can then categorize as landscapes, portraits and studies of the human form? Just for once, imagine how much fun it must be to create something that shuns every classification or where nobody knows where top and bottom are!" Lynn
Another photographer that is a huge inspiration to me is John Gay. His street photography (and product photography) is wonderful. You can see his work here: https://burghhouse.museumssites.com/the_collection/artists/john-gay/initial/g
Shades of more modern Atget style street there. It grieves me that our streets no longer have the magic as they once had.
