Theory: February 2007 Archives

There probably isn't a photography message board on the Web that doesn't intermittently boil over with accusations of plagiarism for some photograph that treads to carefully to another, either famous or obscure.

Personism picks up on this today, following on the heels of the recent (different) coverage in Slate a little while back.

This topic is the overarching subject of Geoff Dyer's Ongoing Moment, which I read last year. (There's an audio interview with Dyer on KCRW.) Rather than blaming similarities between photographs on plagiarism, Dyer describes a community of artists who are unified in their subject matter, mostly in the absence of any other connection.

One badly-formed comparison in the Slate "article" (it's really just a slide show) is between William Eggleston and Christian Patterson. Christian is described as an "admirer" of Eggleston as if he was some sort of sort of stalker without noting the personal connection between the two.