Notes on Copying

Every image you have ever saved is an argument about what is good. The folder, the board, the camera roll full of screenshots: these are not collections so much as drafts of a self. We have never had so many references, or so little agreement on what to do with them.

This essay is about that problem. It is not an argument against copying, which would be pointless; everything is copied from something. It is an attempt to work out when copying becomes something else.

A reference is a promise. When a designer pins a photograph of a 1960s chair, they are promising themselves something: this, but not this. The reference holds a quality, a proportion, a mood, that they intend to find again in their own way.

The trouble begins when the promise is forgotten and the reference becomes the result. We have all seen it: the shop interior that is a mood board with a till, the collection that is a scrapbook with price tags. Nothing is wrong, exactly. It is just that nothing has happened.

The useful question is not did you copy but how far did you travel. Good work carries its references a long way. You can feel the source in it, but you could not point to it. The proportion is borrowed; the material is new. The colour is quoted; the use is not.

Distance is not the same as disguise. Hiding a source is easy and dull. Transforming one requires that you understand why it worked in the first place, and that understanding is the actual work. A copy reproduces the outcome. A good reading reproduces the reasoning.

We talk about taste as if it were a possession, something you have or lack. But taste is mostly an activity: the endless small decisions about what to keep and what to leave out. The archive is not the taste. The editing is.

Which is why the most interesting people now are not the ones with the best references. Everyone has the best references; they are a search away. The interesting people are the ones who leave the most out.

An empty folder is not a lack of taste. Sometimes it is the opposite.

Next time you save an image, write one sentence about why. Not what it is, but what it is for. In a month, read the sentences without the images.

You will find out what you actually believe. It is usually less than you thought, and much more specific, and that specific thing is the only part nobody else can copy.