This is a tricky article to write. I’m writing it because of observations I’ve made within the photography community, so here goes.

As photographers, we all know that copying other photos and reverse engineering them is part and parcel of our learning experience. We’ve all been on more or less the same journey, impressing ourselves with what we now know to be rather cliché shots that, at the time, we thought were amazing. I’m talking about selective colour, Dutch tilt, and all the stuff that we learn from and leave behind as we find our own photographic voice. There are some examples around of more extreme learning where photographers are literally cloning the work of others in a copycat fashion, and that’s what I want to try and pick apart today.

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