The Louvre has maintained a copyist tradition since it first opened as a public museum in 1793. Artists may request permits to copy works in the galleries, although not surprisingly, certain restrictions apply. The copy must be one-fifth smaller than the original, and the original artist’s signature mustn't be reproduced. Nobody wants an unusually gifted student wandering off with a plausible Rubens. Apart from that, the artist is pretty much free to plagiarise to their heart's content.
It is one of the Louvre’s oldest educational traditions – even the great Cézanne copied there as a young painter. He honed his skill by returning again and again to the old masters. He said 'the Louvre is the book from which we learn to read'.
Photography has never quite made peace with the same tradition; at least not as a shared apprenticeship. Of course we have museums, histories, monographs; enough influence to sink a small ship really. But there is no accepted practice of copying as apprenticeship in quite the same way.
Say the word copying to a room full of photographers and watch everyone suddenly become very interested in their shoes. Ha! Ironically we are remarkably pious about originality, considering we work with a machine that reproduces the world at the press of a button. Find your own style they tell us. Shoot what only you can see. Do not imitate. Plagiarism is punishable by social death and an extended stint on the naughty step.
The anxiety is understandable. A camera copies so easily, so instantly, that we patrol the borders rather more anxiously than painters ever needed to. A painter who spends a month copying a Delacroix has clearly done something skilful. There is labour in it, visible labour. We tend to think that a photographer who emulates someone else's work has simply positioned their tripod legs in the same place and done very little else.
Consider for a moment what the copyist painter is actually doing. They are not manufacturing a souvenir. They are observing intently. They are understanding that the passage of green in the shadow, the one you would swear was casual, turns out to be essential. Move it a centimetre and the picture becomes unbalanced. And not in a good way. It becomes apparent that every decision the original artist made was made for a reason. The copyist is reading with their hands and has to repeat that process and reach an understanding of why the colours and shapes exist as they do. You simply cannot learn this by looking alone. Copying makes you stop at every mark and ask why it is there.
Other traditions have been less embarrassed by this. In sixth-century China, Xie He set down six principles by which painting should be judged, and one of them was the copying of the masters, listed without apology alongside brushwork and composition. It was not viewed as a lesser activity.
Jazz musicians still understand this perfectly well. They learn solos from records note by note, lifting the needle, going back, getting the phrase under the fingers long before they fully understand what it means. In that context, imitation is not treated as theft.
Perhaps that is the bit many photographers resist. We want the voice without having to put in the grunt work. But nobody speaks in their own voice until they have borrowed, mangled, misunderstood, and absorbed a few others. Until other voices have had their say.
What would it mean for a photographer to copy as a painter copies?
Not heading off in search of your own decisive moment. We have all done that, I imagine. I have a folder full of Jay Maisel gestures that never quite hit the spot. Or pitifully inept Chris Friel-lite imitations.
I mean doubling down and getting involved. Not pastiche or plagiarism in a beret. Or visual grazing – we all enjoy scrolling through other people’s work, absorbing a few ideas, and then trying them on for size. But that is something else entirely.
The deliberate version that takes time. Choosing one artist whose work really resonates. Then trying, with your own tools and your own subjects, to remake what it does. Not what it shows. What it does.
Take Rothko. The problem is clearly not how to photograph rectangles. Mostly we can manage that unaided. The problem is how colour can be made to behave. How a flat field can affect people so forcefully. Vuillard asks for something different: it's not about a woman in a patterned room, but the strange democracy of the pattern itself, where figure, wallpaper, dress and chair all negotiate for the same inch of attention.
And of course you will fail. The copy will not come off. At least not in the way you hope. But the variations and the glitches might be more useful than you realise. Of course, your own habits will keep breaking through – your hand moves at its own speed. Your prejudices about colour start getting in the way. Your tolerance for emptiness, clutter, blur, awkwardness, prettiness, drama, restraint, all of it begins to surface.
Perhaps you set out to be Rothko and something stubbornly un-Rothko-like keeps surfacing. And that could just be a new voice of your own.
I speak from experience. My own attempts to borrow the weight of Franz Kline have mostly produced tangled black scribbles, though the scribbles turned out to be instructive. They showed me what I didn't want rather than what I did. Something else to cross off the list. We set out grandly in pursuit of one idea and maybe all we end up doing is narrowing the field. Realising who we are not.
A voice is not something you find by focussing intently on it. Try that and it behaves like the morning mist here on the Silver Coast: present one moment, gone the moment you think you have nailed it. Voice is what remains after you have tried, sincerely and repeatedly, to be other people, and failed in your own particular fashion.
This is also why the idea belongs so naturally in a community given to working in projects. A set of studies after one artist is a real body of work, not an exercise with a guilty conscience. It has a spine already in place. Ten photographs after Agnes Martin is a project you could begin on Monday. It has boundaries, a question, and a built-in way of watching yourself drift away from the source.
If, by the end, the work has very little to do with Agnes Martin at all, that is not a failure of the project. That is the project beginning to do its job. There will be lessons learned and ideas to take forward to another day.
Why is it, I wonder, that we treat influence as something to conceal, a debt we hope nobody uncovers? The copyists in the museum do the opposite. They stand in public, in front of the painting, in front of everyone and go about their work.
All images (bar the Louvre) are my composites; Lightroom originals + AI 'copying', + Photoshop 'cheating'. Or however you want to spin it.