Rob Prideaux, a fellow San Francisco photographer, wrote about the Exclusivity of Ideas over on his blog. I was glad to have met Rob recently, because I had seen his image of a dissected frog (above) at an exhibition shortly after cutting up my own amphibian for a photo. He informed me we were not the only ones - Adam Voorhes also likes exploded views of dead animals.

I agree with Rob in that I don’t feel much ownership over my ideas. Ideas seem cheap to me. It’s not thinking up ideas that is the problem (I have more than I know what to do with), it’s executing them. My desk is covered in piles of sticky notes for ideas I’m sure are genius, if only I could get around to shooting them. Much like photography draws from the external world, ideas come from editing the stream of our experiences into something new. It is that personal assemblage that determines the execution and makes the photograph yours.

It is interesting and sometimes scary to think of where ideas come from. The creative dilemma is of course, “if you don’t know, how can you do it again?” because nothing is created in a vacuum. I actually do remember what experience compelled me to spend an afternoon with an X-acto knife and a departed member of the animal kingdom, and it wasn’t my high school biology class (we did pig fetuses). My friend came home from her summer camp job with some left over frogs, we had some beer and a can of pink spray paint handy, and I had been listening to a certain infamous album that was banned for it’s offensive cover art.

What I don’t have any clue about is what broader context Rob, Adam, and I drew from to arrive at similar conclusions, because I am pretty sure their process did not involve bad death metal.