Bosca Dubh

A recent post from twinlens directed me to the Photoblogs.org Wiki entry for Cliches within Photoblogging. There’s a nice little checklist of old ideas, of which I’ve hit a few. How about you?

• Flower macros
• disregarded / ripped chairs
• Mannequins
• Sunrises
• Zoo pictures
• pictures shot and then modified with stock Photoshop filters
• images shot with a holga (just because you used a holga doesn’t make it good)
• fall foliage
• water reflections

There are still quite a few I haven’t covered yet: pigeons, eye macros, shopping trollies, graffiti, sunsets, funny signs, homeless people, aquarium pictures, pictures with Photoshopped tilt shift, pictures with Photoshoped holga effects, abandoned buildings, people in clown makeup (or some other silly costume), pretty clouds, empty roads, abandoned factories, peeling paint, barns, children fingerpainting, bubbles, long exposures of the beach at night, seagulls, swans, ducks, couples on the beach, and cats. But I’ll be sure to put those on my “life list” and check them off.

In all seriousness, though–a list like this can have paralysing effects on the faint of heart. Someone who is worried about their originality and creativity and general worth as an artist, photographer, or human being will be frozen with their finger on the shutter wondering, “Am I about to commit the Sin of the Cliche?”

Pshaw, I say. As Ecclesiastes points out:

The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.

I was actually taken to task on this matter once with a review of my short story, “Self Defense”. The premise of this little story, the reviewer noted, is “old as time”. And I suppose it is. Certainly it wasn’t my most original thought, though I’m not displeased with the writing (and it was a listed as a notable story in the storySouth Million Writers competition, so I’m apparently not the only one). Of the stories I’ve had published, I’d say that only two of them–“Ichthyology” and “Sunshine Over Helsinki”–were at all “original”, and of course even those have their precedence.

Most of us probably have only one or two really original thoughts in us; the rest of the time, we work over the same terrain, trying to find some new twist on an old tale. And working within that constraint, the smallness of the human mind, can be useful–think how many great versions of the haiku and sonnet have been produced by sticking to the rules. Or how many variations there are on the two-minute pop song, three-chord punk song, twelve-bar blues, or two-part reel fill up our collective musical consciousness. We’d all like, perhaps, to be original geniuses, but most of us have to make due with producing something interesting in the realm of the known.

I would even go so far as to say that there’s a certan joy in the familiar. If there weren’t, would there be so many “genre” novels and stories? The conventions of mystery or science fiction tales, or of certain kinds of photography (“toy” cameras and landscapes are the ones I seem to hit most often), give the practitioner a set of known quantities from which to draw, and in combining these produce things that are pleasing and even enlightening, even if not exactly original.

So fear not the cliche. Make it new, make it your own, but know that whatever you’re trying to do has probably been tried before.