It must be irritating...

It must be irritating for a photographer to source a location, take the model there, get some good shots, pay her more or less generously for her time, and then a couple of days later the model goes back there in exactly the same spot with another photographer and does something that is a bit more imaginative perhaps but  still in the same style! Before you ask, I am not guilty of anything of the sort. But while checking out a photographer's credentials on a model/photographer site I saw an image that was taken at the very same location as another image that was recently uploaded  on an art megasite by a highly respected photographer. The location is unmistakable and the model is the same. The images are in exactly the same style, both b/w, except that one is analogue, the other is digital, but any one image could have been taken by photographer number 1 (or indeed photographer number 2) as part of his shoot - analogue and digital mean nothing when viewed online, they are both exactly the same.

I could give links to  the  images in question to show what I mean but I will refrain - I dont want to make enemies, I have plenty of them already. But this whole matter begs the question of originality. What is it and does it matter?
That the work of art should be original was one of the tenets of modernism. By modernism I mean the artistic movement that swept Europe and America, indeed the entire world, from about 1850 to the 1960s. A long time indeed.  The Artist (always with a capital A) was unaccountable to society but only to Art, everything had to be new and never seen before, original, different. 
It was postmodernism that brought back the idea of  'so what if it has been seen before? that's not the point. The point is to subvert it and make fun of it, to reinterpret it'. Pastiche was a favourite among postmodern artists, the mixing of things, the double coding. It  usually was something deployed when dealing with  "great works of art" of the past. 

In our case neither photographers nor the model are great and/or exemplary, so the whole thing smacks of ...being copy cats?Or maybe in this particular case the model may have felt frustrated at not being able to use the location as she would have liked and so went back there with another photographer and finally achieved what she desired. Who is to say?


(All photos modelled by Alex B. and taken by Marcello Pozzetti)