How can we still be creative?

Painted Hand in Ansazi Ruin, Mystery Valley, USA

When I came back from my trip to the Southwest USA last year I came back wondering if it's possible for any photographer to be truly creative in places that have been photographed millions of times. Then I looked at some of my images from that trip and I thought that maybe I had some that I liked and to be honest, some of them were unlike anything I had seen before regarding those places. I was happy...

Until I saw a post in Guy Tal's blog... Guy Tal is a photographer whose work I've admired for quite some time now. In this post he had a photo of a painted hand in Cedar Mesa, and even though it's in black and white, it reminded me of one of those photos I took during that trip. It's not even in the same place, mine is was taken in Mystery Valley, in an Anasazi ruin called Many Hands, during a photo trip I did with a Navajo Guide, but the resemblance in composition is pretty obvious.

Now my concern isn't really who took his photo first or if one can be considered a copy of the other. I hope Guy does not think, if he ever sees my photo, that I tried to copy from him, because when I shot this image I did not even know about Guy's photo. But this raises an interesting question: how can you still be creative today ?

I mean, one may think that he has a great photo only to know that it has been shot before. Or that someone else will shoot a similar image in the future without ever knowing that the image looks like another one that already existed.

A few months have passed and I still have no answer to this question. However, I know that it is indeed possible to be creative. That's the beauty of photography (and all art). When you think you have seen all possible angles of a subject, someone else comes and presents it to you like you had never seen before. These are the moments when I feel real joy. It's when I feel that the world is a place full of possibilities and that they're all here for us to experience in our own personal way.

So I've actually given up trying to answer the question. I just shoot what moves me, trying to be as open as I can to all those possibilities, and I hope that maybe one of those shots can one day help someone see the world a little differently.