
The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography (2006) - wallflower
https://petapixel.com/2013/03/13/the-helsinki-bus-station-theory-finding-your-own-vision-in-photography/
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Nomentatus
I'm most familiar with playwriting. My experience was that nearly every writer
copies, panders (to the immediate opinion of their peers), and cognitively-
herds like hell. They don't have a problem introducing superficial
differences, they just have a problem being honest, authentic, or original -
cause that might not please their peers instantly. They might not fit in.
That's not just a local phenomenon, go read a book of short plays from the
thirties, say, and nearly all will be trash for those reasons. Trash = not
worth reading. (Lots of laughable interpretations of Freudianism, which was
held in awe in artistic circles at the time, etc.)

For me the advice boils down to: don't worry if your plays mention dogs or
include cousins just 'cause a famous author's plays do too. Which is true
advice, just not that useful in bringing into the Valhalla of real art.

My advice would be: Do offend your peers and court their contempt. Almost no-
one else will do this, so you can hardly help creating work that's original
and which might survive with its reputation intact, which happens rarely with
art.

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atombender
Can someone explain what's special about the (actual) Helsinki bus station?
Genuinely curious.

I googled it, and all I see is a very ordinary, modern, un-beautiful bus
station, like the ones you find all over Europe, so I'm having trouble
understanding why it's a "cool backdrop" or "famous" (other than the author
using it as a convenient metaphor).

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theoh
From the article: "The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line
but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate,
each number heading off to its own unique destination."

So Helsinki is an example, maybe not unique, of a bus station where it takes
some time for (at least some of) the different numbered buses to diverge from
a single route ("career trajectory").

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atombender
But he's describing it in visual terms: "the Helsinki bus station makes a cool
backdrop for Magnum wannabes". Here, "cool backdrop" implies that a lot of
photographers shoot it because it _looks_ cool. But I get the sense from the
article overall that he's thinking of the bus stop in purely metaphorical
terms, so the language is confusing.

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blahedo
That's just an artful aside; he then brings us back to the real reason he's
bringing it up, which is the transit system pattern rather than the station
itself. (And, the transit system pattern is not uncommon but also not quite
universal either, so he went with the specific example he knew of from where
he was from, I'm guessing.)

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akvadrako
This applies to more than just photography.

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two2two
I agree. The author starts out talking about the ubiquity of photography as a
medium and then uses it more of an example to basically say that one should be
prolific. I find the idea similar to the article posted last month, "Stop
trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead" [0]

[0] [http://prolifiko.com/prolific/](http://prolifiko.com/prolific/)

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efm
The advice is more specific than "Be prolific". It's "Be prolific within
constraints." The former is the error of switching before you get to fluency
(getting of the bus too soon).

