There has been a controversy about the startling resemblance  of Canadian photographer David Burdeny’s  images  to some of the work of Chinese photographer Sze Tsung Leong.  For brevity’s sake, I’ll restrict my comments to that comparison, but several blogs have mentioned other photographers seemingly channeled by David Burdeny.  The resemblance was first noticed by the blog for the Photo District News and later three more blogs, noted for their seriousness towards issues photographic, picked up the ball with extensive discussions of what comprises plagiarism as well as providing images buttressing arguments pro and con.  Those would be The Online Photographer, Muse-ings, and Conscientious and doubtless there are others who have weighed in with their comments. *

I provide two examples which to my mind make it clear that there is more than a resemblance between the two artist’s work. You will find others on the aforementioned blogs.  In fact, there seems no escaping the observation that in both cases Burdeny’s images are deliberate copies of Leong’s photographs. However plagiarism is defined, and the blogs do a good job  of exploring the legal and ethical connotations of that term,  I know plagiarism when I see it and this is such a obvious  case that I am surprised there is any debate.

 

Tse Tung Leong: Dashur, Egypt, 2007

 

 

David Burdeny, Bent Pyramid, 2009

 

Part of what defines plagiarism is intent : if you declare your work to be a copy of another’s work you’re either making a homage or displaying your virtuosity as a forger. In the case of  the Rephotographic Survey Project series done in the  late 1970s by Mark Klett and others , in which there was a deliberate effort to completely recreate W.H. Jackson’s landscapes after the passage of a century or so,  you have both motives coupled with a scientific inquiry into the effect of time. Another possibility is that you’re allying yourself with artists such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, both of whom deliberately copy other people’s artwork as a conceptual enterprise.

However, in my opinion if you conceal the fact that your art work is a deliberate duplicate of someone else’s art, you’re a plagiarist.

One’s work can legitimately resemble other work and in fact, it would be a cause for alarm if it didn’t. Influence is a healthy phenomenon; as the classicists say, we learn  by imitating, and most educators believe that by imitating – not copying! – sooner or later, we find our own voices. The history of art is rife with examples.  Braque’s  work owes a lot to Cezanne and Cezanne’s early work shows the influence of Poussin and Pissarro. Early Cartier-Bresson looks  like Brassai and some of  Sally Mann’s early work clearly reflects the influence of Emmett Gowin.  The artists in all those examples went on to discover their own influential and powerfully original voices.  There is a continuum of influence from one artist to another and from one era to  another that is a pleasure to discover.  Plagiarism on the other hand brings that continuum to an abrupt halt; there’s no place to go after that discovery.

 

Sze Tsung Leong: Seine 1, 2006

 

 

David Burdeny, River Seine 2, 2009

 

Burdeny essentially claims he is mimicking, not copying, a claim that shows he misunderstands the meaning of both terns. Copying means “to make an identical duplicate of” and mimicking means “to imitate, to resemble” . It’s a question of degree. If you mimic an art work it is likely  some part of that  work will remain substantially different as well as emphatically similar. To copy work is to replicate it in almost every detail. True, in the photographs of Paris there seems to be a difference of season and in one of the Egyptian photos the angle of the pyramid is different. These are insignificant variations especially when compared to the far more significant similarities. The images remain as  examples of faithful copies, not mere mimicries.

“To imply that I am somehow the first person who has ever made a similar image, even if I was aware of that image—that’s the climate that everybody else works in…people appropriate other people’s images, people are aware of certain people’s work, the knowledge of what people are doing travels at light speed. Everybody draws from each other….”  David Burdeny.

Disingenuous to say the least. People don’t appropriate other people’s images unless it’s a deliberate conceptual strategy. Yes, borrowing, and blatant borrowing at that, goes on in fashion and advertising and of course is present in the field of fine-art. Downright plagiarism is rarer. Andy Warhol perhaps illustrated a contemporary attitude towards photography in that he apparently thought photographs existed for the gathering. But he never pretended the photographs he used were authored by him ( a few were) although once he was finished altering them, they became his. As far as blaming the duplication on the ‘climate’ of the time, it is true every era has a certain generic look. In our time, large front-mounted glossy color prints constitutes the look; in the 1970s, East Coast photography often consisted of small black and white prints with black lines around the images.  But within that generic similarity you had some of the most original visual minds of the 20th century making images: Friedlander, Winiogrand and Arbus, just to name three.

Burdeny maintains “ these are fairly common tourist locations…more often than not I am standing next to someone who is taking the same image… There are hundreds of copies of pretty much the same viewpoint.”

Poor Leong; he has not only inspired one plagiarist but apparently hundreds. Can you imagine an artist being content just to take someone else’s picture? Or worse, being proud of it, to the point where he’d display it to the public? No one is maintaining that photographing  the same subject constitutes plagiarism. You might even say that that there is no such thing as original subject matter; the originality lies in one’s vision of that subject. Given that proposition it is evident that Burdeny has a counterfeit vision: parasite-like, he is content to let another photographer not only choose his subject but even choose how he sees that subject; in other words he’s a plagiarist.

I don’t know how many of you have tried to take another person’s photograph. I have, and it’s damned difficult. As I related in another post ( “Frank Redux”) as an art student I spent some time trying to re-take one of Frank’s L.A. images from 1956: St Francis and City Hall.  I was more interested in sharing the experience than  in making any kind of statement.  Had I succeeded I certainly would have termed the work a homage. But the fact is even though I discovered the location of this image, the look and spirit of Robert Frank had long since vanished, locked up forever in the pages in The Americans. As I said in the previous post:

“Long after I had given up this quixotic quest, I was standing on a street corner in LA and I looked up to see the statue of St. Francis. But it wasn’t a Robert Frank picture: the light was different, the time was different, and I wasn’t Robert Frank!”

 

 

Robert Frank: St. Francis and City Hall, L.A. 1956

 

 

So even if  were I inclined to duplicate  this Robert Frank photograph and pass it off as one of mine ( hoping no one would remember the original) I certainly would not attempt to re-take the same picture even if I could find the imprint of Frank’s feet, and even if I knew the exact time and season when he made the image. No, instead I would  re-photograph Frank’s image, either by scanning or duplicating it with a copy camera. I would then in the post-processing, attempt to change it just enough to avoid the label of plagiarist.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be the Burdeny strategy. I doubt if he traveled to France  to make that image of Paris; most likely he went no further than the pages of Leong’s 2007 catalog of “Horizons” . There is no other way to explain the fact that light, the vantage point and the visual facts are almost exactly the same. A shift in the color balance; changing the season from winter to Spring by adding some leaves to the trees, and altering the reflections in the water seems to be the extent a lethargic Burdeny can add to Leong’s vision.  Nevertheless, whether Burdeny traveled to France or got no further than an image in a catalog, these minute alterations hardly disguise the fact what we have here is a blatant example of plagiarism.

 

 

 

*Soon after finishing the above, the story appeared in the Los Angeles Times http://articles.latimes.com/2010/feb/28/entertainment/la-ca-photoplagiarism28-2010feb28. It looks like Burdeny’s  pilfering may be going national.