The Louvre has maintained a copyist tradition since it first opened as a public museum in 1793. Artists may apply for permits to copy works in the galleries, although there are rules, naturally. The copy must be one fifth smaller than the original, and the original artist’s signature cannot be reproduced. Nobody wants an unusually gifted student wandering off with a plausible Rubens.
It is one of the Louvre’s oldest educational habits. Cézanne, who copied there as a young painter and kept returning to the old masters, put it beautifully: the Louvre is the book from which we learn to read.
Photography has never quite made peace with the same thing, at least not as a shared apprenticeship. We have museums, histories, monographs; enough influence to sink a small ship, but no accepted practice of copying as apprenticeship. No shared book in which we might learn, slowly and awkwardly, how to read.
Say the word copying to a room full of photographers and watch everyone suddenly become very interested in their shoes. 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. Shoot what only you can see. Do not imitate. Plagiarism is punishable by social death and a stern reprimand in the comments section.
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. There is labour in it, visible labour. A photographer who makes a picture that resembles someone else’s has, we quietly suspect, done nothing at all.
Look at what the copyist painter is actually doing. They are not manufacturing a souvenir. They are reading with their hands. Every decision the original artist made, they now have to make again. That passage of green in the shadow, the one you would swear was casual, turns out to be exact. Crucial, even. Move it a centimetre and the picture falters. You cannot learn this by looking alone. The eye moves easily across the surface of a good painting, accepting its authority without understanding how it was made. 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 quite without apology alongside brushwork and composition. Transmission was not a lesser activity. It was part of the art.
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 but as apprenticeship. This is how a language gets out of the head and into the fingers.
Perhaps that is the bit many photographers resist. We want the voice without the scales, the originality without the apprenticeship, the style without the long, humbling business of discovering where it came from. 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 landed. Or pitifully inept Chris Friel-lite imitations.
I mean influence with its sleeves rolled up. Not pastiche. Not plagiarism in a beret. And certainly not the thin, slightly anaemic version many of us already practise, which is to scroll through other people’s work, absorb the general weather of what seems fashionable, and then wonder why our own pictures have begun to look faintly generic.
That is not copying. That is grazing. I mean the deliberate version. The version that takes time. Choosing one artist whose work will not leave you alone. Choosing one picture. 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 hover, press, breathe, or hum. How a flat field can feel less like a surface and more like a weather system. Vuillard asks for something different: not a woman in a patterned room, but the strange democracy of pattern itself, where figure, wallpaper, dress and chair all negotiate for the same inch of attention. And Agnes Martin is not an invitation to become neat and tidy. Her lines are barely the point. What matters is the tremor inside the restraint, the way feeling appears without ever raising its voice.
And of course you will fail. The copy will not come off, however the ways in which it refuses to come off just might be the most useful part of the exercise. Your own habits will keep breaking through, because they cannot help themselves. Your hand moves at its own speed. Your eye keeps sliding towards its preferred corner of the frame. Your colour sense starts interfering. Your tolerance for emptiness, clutter, blur, awkwardness, prettiness, drama, restraint, all of it begins to show its hand.
Perhaps you set out to be Rothko and something stubbornly un-Rothkolike keeps surfacing. That stubborn residue is probably where you should begin.
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 more useful than the ambition. Which is often the way of things. We set out grandly in pursuit of one idea and trip over the thing we actually needed.
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.
And that drifting might just be the thing.
If, by the end, the work has very little to do with Agnes Martin at all, good. That is not a failure of the project. That is the project beginning to do its job. The finished set would tell you far more about your instincts than another year spent trying to be original on demand, which is surely one of the more exhausting and unhelpful demands we place on ourselves.
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 declare the relationship. This came from there. I am studying it. I am not pretending otherwise. A radical declaration in many ways.
Copying, in this sense, is not the borrowing of someone else’s signature effect and hoping nobody notices; it is an attempt to understand the pressure system inside the work. So. Whose work would you copy, if you gave yourself permission?
All images (bar the Louvre) are my composites; Lightroom originals + AI 'copying', + Photoshop 'cheating'. Or however you want to spin it.