[Multitudes]

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Originally Posted by Bird as far as i know ........ i can say that Paolo Roversi, wich i also love, is more likely the one who gets inspired with Sarah ........ but becouse this is a matter of enjoing art ...... it make no sence to me to get there ...... they are both great photographers. What can i say .........there is one word that tells everything about his search and probablley Sarah as well ............ and i feel and belive ...... we all can see ...... " l'anima " of the portrait ...... on all their beautifull pictures ........and the magic happend infront of us when we see them ... Thank you Sarah, and Paolo for your magic.

Estevan, you're quite right, there is no need, eventhough the traditional notion of "influence" is amazingly persistent. Although the logic of influence has been deconstructed, reinvented and reversed by several critics during the last seventy years, many people can't resist its attraction. T.S. Elliot challenges it elegantly in his 1919 essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent":

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Whoever has approved this idea of order (...) will not find it proposterous that the past should be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past

Or more radical put by art historian Michael Baxandall:

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But influence I do not want to talk about

Elliot propose a reverse mechanism, not instead of it, but next to it; the past is also altered by the present, while for Baxandall "influence" is a curse of art criticism primarily because of its wrongheaded grammatical prejudice about who is the agent and who is the patient: it seems to reverse the active/passive relation which the historical actor experiences and the inferential beholder will wish to take into account.

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If one say that X influenced Y it does seem that one is saying that X did something to Y rather than Y did something to X. But in the consideration of good pictures and painters the second is always the more lively reality

As Baxandall sugest, in the case of any "good" artist, it is not only he/she who is the agent instead of the patient, but the kind of activity which he performs on the work of the predecessor is much more diverse and complex than what is implied by the shallow term "influence":

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If we think of Y rather than X as the agent, the vocabulary is much richer and more attractively diversified: draw on, resort to, avail oneslf of, appropriate from, have ressource to, adapt, quote, differentiate oneself from, assimilate oneself to, assimilate, align oneself with, copy, address, paraphrase, absorb, make a variation on, revive, continue, remodel, ape, emulate, travesty, paraody, extract from, distort, attend to, resist, simplify, reconstitute, elaborate on, develop, face up to, master, subvert, perpetuate, reduce, promote, respond to, transform, tackle ...-everyone will be able to think of others

The complex way in which art acts upon predecessors suggests that it is not so much the present but rather the past which is conditioned by a perpetual flux. It is precisely this idea that is elaborated by Mieke Bal in her 1999 book "Quoting Caravaggio: Contemporary Art, preposterous History". reading contemporary art works in their relation to Caravaggio or other baroque works, she demonstrates the idea that art's engagement with what came before it, involves an active reworking of the predecessor.

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Hence, the work performed by later images obliterates the older images as they were before that intervention and creates new versions of old images instead.

If we take Eliot's, Baxandall's and Bal's critigue of the idea of influence into account, it entails a major shift in the discourses of art(every artform!). It breaks down the hierarchy constituted in the shallow term "influence", and we are left with much more interesting questions. We can now start to see/read art for what art should be, a reinvention/reconcentration of matter.

Just some thoughts on influence, but back to magical Sarah Moon. I do see it! ...