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Stay on the effing bus
The Helsinki bus station
Minkkinen, a Finnish-American photographer, gave the 2004 commencement speech at the New England School of Photography. He asked the graduates to imagine the big bus station in the center of Helsinki, his hometown. It has two dozen platforms, each with several bus lines, and every line leaving a given platform follows the same route for a few miles to get out of the city.
Getting off the bus
He compared the early years of a career to those first miles. Each stop on the route is one year of a photographer's life. After three years of work, a photographer brings it to a museum, and the curator mentions an artist whose work is very similar. The photographer realizes others have already done what took three years, hops off the bus, grabs a cab because life is short, and heads back to the station to find another bus.
A few years later the same thing happens again. The work looks far from original, so the photographer gets off and returns to the station once more, hoping the next bus will finally deliver the originality they want.
Where the routes split
The buses that share a route for the first few stops eventually diverge. Bus 33 suddenly goes north and bus 19 heads southwest. Buses 21 and 71 may run side by side for a while, but they split off too. Minkkinen's answer to all of it was to stay on the bus, and he put it with a swear word in the middle. The Helsinki bus station theory holds that the only way to reach true originality is to stay on one bus long enough for a unique path to unfold.
Why do early artists so often copy others?
Imitation has long been the standard way to learn a craft. Renaissance workshops trained apprentices by having them copy the master's drawings and paint in the master's manner before they developed their own. Benjamin Franklin wrote in his autobiography that he taught himself to write by rewriting essays from The Spectator in his own words and comparing them with the originals. Copying exposes the choices behind finished work, which is why derivative early work is a common stage rather than a sign of a dead end.
Why do different bus lines share one stretch of road?
Transit planners often run many lines along a single trunk corridor out of a central hub, because the street network funnels traffic through a few good roads. Sharing the trunk lets one stretch of road, with its stops and bus lanes, serve many routes at once. The lines then branch toward separate neighborhoods once the corridor reaches the point where the street grid fans out. Hub-and-spoke layouts like this are used by transit systems in cities around the world.
How does a photographer's style actually emerge?
Style tends to appear through repeated choices about subject, framing, light, and what to leave out. Over hundreds of photographs those choices settle into habits that viewers can recognize. Henri Cartier-Bresson, for example, spent decades photographing candid street scenes with a small Leica, and his handling of timing became so consistent that it is known as the decisive moment. A recognizable voice in photography has often come from a long run of work in one place or on one subject.
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