You stand there in front of someone else’s vision, whether it’s Diane Arbus showing you how broken people are beautiful or Cartier-Bresson with his decisive moment horseshit, and it gets inside you like a virus, like Burroughs’ language virus, and suddenly you’re not seeing anymore, you’re remembering how someone else saw.
These dancers on this volcano, and Christ, what a sick, gorgeous metaphor that is, they’re doing the same brutal math we all do. They’ve learned every position, every line from Balanchine or Graham or whoever the hell broke them in, and now they’re out there on volcanic rock, literal fucking magma underneath, trying to make something that’s theirs. Trying to burn off the scar tissue of their teachers.
Because that’s what the quote’s really about, isn’t it? It’s not some zen koan about finding yourself. It’s about the violence of becoming. Nietzsche didn’t just “read” Schopenhauer, he was infected by him, colonized by pessimism so profound it could justify suicide as a reasonable lifestyle choice. And then he had to tear that infestation out of his brain with his bare hands, had to savage his own intellectual father figure to death just to hear his own voice again.
My photography, hell, my anything, is always going to be contaminated at first. I’m going to shoot like the people who made me want to shoot. I’m going to see their ghosts in your viewfinder. And that’s fine, that’s necessary even, like learning chord progressions before I can write a song (never done this) or getting drunk before you can write honestly about sobriety (never done that either).
But eventually, and this is where it gets ugly, you have to murder your influences. Not ignore them, not thank them and move on like some gracious commencement speech. You have to kill them. Because if you don’t, you’re just a cover band, and nobody needs another cover band.