Commercial photography aside, trust is a tough issue. There are billions of photographs online (in reality any person has access only to a very small fraction of them), and the question often becomes how one can have any faith in one’s photographs if there are so many others already out there (you might have noticed: I just called it faith, instead of trust - pick the word that comes closer to what you feel). For me, the answer has always been very simple. It comes in the form of a question: What does it matter if other people take photographs? What do other people’s photographs have to do with your own photographs?

Again, this seems to come down to trust: Only if you don’t have trust in your photographs, if you don’t have the faith that your photography expresses what you want it to express, only then can you be bothered by other people’s photographs. After all, as a photographer there is only one person that can express what you want to express, and that’s you. If you don’t have the faith that you can do that, then you might think that someone else can do it, that someone else can take a photograph that expresses what you want to express.

I can think of all kinds of areas where a person could indeed express another person’s ideas or thinking - but none of those areas have anything to do with art: A medical diagnosis, a scientific theory, a political slogan, … But I yet have to come across two novels by two different authors that express the same idea in the exact same way. I yet have to come across two songs by two different composers that express the same feeling in the exact same way.