Influence vs. Inspiration
Someone once described inspiration as the one-night stand of creativity.
The moment I heard that I knew it was right. Inspiration is wild, electric, and completely unreliable. It shows up without warning, fills you with energy and possibility, and then disappears just as fast. You can’t schedule it. You can’t manufacture it. And if you wait around for it to show up before you do any serious work, you’ll be waiting a long time.
Influence is something else entirely. It’s the long-term relationship. The thing that shapes how you see without announcing itself. The accumulation of every photographer, painter, filmmaker, and teacher whose work got into your bones somewhere along the way and never fully left.
For me that list includes Peter Lindbergh, Helmut Newton, Ellen von Unwerth, and Irving Penn, among many others. Their work didn’t just impress me. It changed how I look at light, at people, at the space between a subject and the camera. I don’t think about them consciously when I’m shooting. I don’t need to. They’re already there.
Why inspiration alone isn’t enough
The problem with chasing inspiration is that it produces starts without finishes. You get a spark, you feel the excitement, you begin something, and then the spark fades and you’re left with an unfinished project and the uncomfortable silence of waiting for the next jolt.
A creative practice built entirely on inspiration is exhausting and inconsistent. The work reflects that instability. Great sessions followed by long dry spells. Excitement that never compounds into a developed body of work.
This is something I’ve watched happen to photographers I respect. They’ll produce a stunning set of images when something catches fire in them, then go quiet for months. The work isn’t bad. It just never builds into anything. There’s no through line connecting one project to the next because there’s no deeper foundation underneath the excitement.
Influence gives you that foundation. When a genuine creative spark arrives, you have somewhere to put it. A framework for understanding what it is, what it’s responding to, and how to develop it into something real rather than just riding the wave until it breaks.
How influence actually works
It’s rarely obvious in the moment. You make a compositional choice and realize later it echoes something you studied years ago. You’re drawn to a particular quality of light without fully understanding why until you trace it back to an image that stopped you cold a decade earlier.
That’s not imitation. That’s lineage. Every photographer worth paying attention to has one. The work you absorb becomes part of how you see, and how you see becomes the foundation of everything you make.
Lindbergh’s approach to natural light and emotional honesty changed how I think about portraiture. Newton’s confidence and his willingness to push tension into his images gave me permission to go further than I might have otherwise. Von Unwerth’s sense of play and joy showed me that a serious photographer doesn’t have to be a serious person in the room. These aren’t things I decided intellectually. They seeped in over years of looking closely at work that moved me.
The practical value of knowing your influences is that it gives you somewhere to return when the work feels stale or directionless. Revisiting the photographers who shaped your eye, sitting with their images deliberately rather than scrolling past them, can reorient your thinking in ways that no amount of forcing new ideas will.
Recognizing what’s shaping you
One useful exercise is to look back at a body of your own work and ask honestly where it came from. Most photographers, if they’re being truthful, can trace specific choices back to specific sources. A lighting approach borrowed from someone they admired early on. A compositional instinct absorbed from a painter they studied. A way of relating to subjects that came from watching someone else do it first.
That tracing isn’t diminishing. It’s clarifying. When you understand your creative roots, you can work with them intentionally rather than being unconsciously pulled in directions you haven’t chosen. You can decide which influences still serve where you’re going and which ones you’ve outgrown.
Staying open to both
The photographers I respect most are deeply rooted and genuinely curious at the same time. They know their lineage. They’ve done the work of understanding what shaped them and why. And they stay open to being surprised, to having something unexpected break through and push them somewhere they didn’t plan to go.
That combination produces work with depth and vitality. The influence keeps it grounded. The inspiration keeps it alive.
Both matter. The trick is understanding which one you’re dealing with when it shows up, and having enough of a foundation that when inspiration arrives, you’re ready to do something real with it rather than just feeling it and watching it pass.
