Inspiration

I'm going through a creative standstill. Sometimes, I get this anxious feeling that I'm not creating enough, that I'm not doing anything to satisfy that side of me which demands for an outlet. Normally when I get these urges I close myself out of the world, and live in a hermitine state creating things. Unfortunately I can't do that anymore. Bills must be paid, and in order to pay for them I have to go to work, and at work I am both retracting away from that creative self, and coming face to face with people that don't really connect with that feeling. Anyway, this is not to say I don't think that people in my office are "below" my artistic values...they each are creative in their own way. But I am extraordinarily restless, and the right side of my brain is supplicating for release.

So, I try to do little things to quiet it down. I go online and look up random artists and topics; searching for inspiration. It was then that I came across an entire MySpace page devoted to the "bob" haircut. It's a french myspace that catalogues 1,428 images devoted to the bob hairstyle and its derivatives.

Looking through the images was like shaking a greyscale snowglobe of eyes, lips and hair angels into constant new configurations...a delightful experience that let me feeling awed and inspired. I wondered if I should be feeling a twing of guilt for ravenously going through what can be classified as "stolen images" - gathered from the web, scanned from magazines and even manipulated without credit. And then it hit me: I don't care.

Of course knowing the artists names would've been nice, but it may have been impossible to compile that information. I enjoyed the site anyway. Was that wrong? I guess it depends on where you think the line of theft gets crossed. Of all places, I've observed that the most embarrassing attitudes towards image theft come from within the alt photo/modeling scene. Every day on every networking site, people swap copyrighted photos for inspiration. It's become part of our culture. In reaction, I've seen many alt photographers and models sick their DMCA-fan army like a pack of attack dogs on any DeviantArt artist or naive foreign-language gothchick photo-swapping blog that gets "reported", and it has always left me feeling more sorry for the target than for the artist who's been "ripped off". I bet that at least at one point in their life, every artist has stumbled across an uncredited image they didn't pay for that affected their aesthetic sensibility. Well, it's time to give that to someone else; today's world just makes this process more transparent, and faced with this new visibility into the life cycle of their work, image owners freak out.

Obviously, it's wrong to steal a photo and proclaim yourself the subject or the photographer; still, I feel that humiliating these people (most of whom are just insecure 13 year olds) publicly should be beneath the image owner, and that a private email or website customer service alert should suffice. However, swiping images or complete art direction, as a means to financial gain is the least forgivable thing of all, and that's when I support the heavy-handed tactics.

Anyway, back to the bobsite. It's amazing; Enjoy! And if you're a photographer who ended up there, be happy. It's the residual effect of producing an iconic image. That fact alone -that it ends up in a place like this where people can find it and get inspired in turn -is something to be proud of.