What If You Shot It Like Someone Else?

Harper's Bazaar sent a young Richard Avedon to Paris to photograph the season's collections. Every other fashion photographer of the era put models in studios, still and composed. Avedon had been watching street photographers. He took his models outside. He put them on the streets of Paris, in cafés, leaping over puddles, twirling at Place de la Concorde. He applied the street photographer's core instinct to couture: spontaneity, movement, the unposed moment.

He described his approach simply: "Those candid snapshots were in direct contrast to what was being done." The fashion editor wanted to kill the images, but Alexey Brodovitch, his art director at Harper's Bazaar, printed them. And fashion photography was never quite the same.

Ernst Haas asked a similar question from the other direction. He came up through photojournalism as one of the most respected documentary photographers of his generation, a Magnum member covering postwar Europe. Then he picked up color film and started applying a painter's eye to everything he saw. Motion blur. Abstract composition. Color as emotion rather than record. In 1962, MoMA gave him the first solo color photography exhibition in the institution's history.

Haas said: "I am not interested in shooting new things. I am interested to see things new."

That is the whole idea in one line.

Sarah Moon did the same thing. She was given fashion assignments, and she shot them like they were dreams. Like they were memories. Like they were paintings. Nobody asked her to. It was her personal visual language, and she brought it to whatever was in front of her camera.

The question worth asking is: what visual language could you explore that you haven't brought to your own work yet?

What would it look like to shoot a landscape like a street photographer? Not the subject, not the location, but the instinct: restless, moving through the scene, pulling something coherent from chaos rather than waiting for the light to cooperate.

What would it look like to shoot a family portrait like a still life? No flattery, no managed smiles. Just arrangement. Patience. An eye for where each person sits in the frame and what the space between them says.

These combinations may feel strange at first. They're supposed to. The strangeness is where the new work lives, and it's generally more alive because of it.

David Bowie spent his career proving exactly that. He moved through genres the way some photographers move through cities: curious, restless, never staying long enough to get comfortable. He said:

He was talking about music. But he could have been talking about any creative practice, including yours.

The photographers who made something genuinely new didn't do it by getting better at what they already knew. That's too comfortable. They did it by experimenting. By borrowing a way of seeing from somewhere else, or by stumbling into something they didn't expect. Either way, they had to be willing to go somewhere unfamiliar first.

THE PRACTICE

Pick a photographer whose genre has nothing to do with yours.

Study one thing they do. Not everything. One thing. The way they use light. The distance they keep from their subject. The thing that makes their work immediately recognizable.

Then go shoot something you normally shoot, with that one thing in mind.

If you shoot landscape, try moving through the scene the way a street photographer would. Don't wait for the light. Follow the instinct.

If you shoot portraits, try arranging your subject the way a still life photographer arranges objects. No performance. No smiles. Just placement, and what the space between things says.

If you shoot street, try slowing down and treating a single corner the way Leiter treated his block in the East Village. Same two blocks, for decades. Depth over distance.

You don't have to show anyone. You don't have to like the results. But something will shift in how you see, and that shift tends to stay.