Originality...

Last night's shenanigans have left me severely hungover today. I have discovered photos, in which I appear, that I have no recollection of having been taken. Thankfully, all are fairly harmless and capture me doing silly things at worst. Nothing too embarrassing has surfaced... yet.

One thing I do remember from last night was a conversation with @sane_eric about a project his daughter has started: to take a photograph every day for a year. I remember comparing it to writing a blog post every day and that conversation we had has gone around in my head all day.

I keep coming back to the concept of originality; surely one of the biggest threats to creativity. There are times when I sit at my keyboard and the only thought in my head is, "I can't think of anything to write about". Whereas, I can; of course I can. There are thousands of things I could write about. What I really mean is, "I can't think of anything to write about that's original". Striving for originality can be the death of creativity. I've touched on this subject before in a post entitled, Variations on a theme...

Of course, at a basic level, nothing is original anymore; everything has already been done. Or has it? Why bother creating anything if someone's already done it. At the risk of contradicting myself, much of what we create is indeed original, whether it's been done before or not; because of when it was created, its relation to other elements and who created it. So, yes it may have been done before a hundred times over but not in the same way as you're doing it now.

I'm reminded of the Noah K Project by Noah Kalina, who has taken a photograph of himself (almost) every day since January 2000 and is still going. There's also a video of the first six years entitled, Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years. Hypnotic.