The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography (2006) | Hacker News Reader

The Helsinki Bus Station Theory: Finding Your Own Vision in Photography (2006)

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63 pointswallflower9 comments

I'm most familiar with playwriting. My experience was that nearly every writer copies, panders (to the immediate opinion of their peers), and cognitively-herds like hell. They don't have a problem introducing superficial differences, they just have a problem being honest, authentic, or original - cause that might not please their peers instantly. They might not fit in. That's not just a local phenomenon, go read a book of short plays from the thirties, say, and nearly all will be trash for those reasons. Trash = not worth reading. (Lots of laughable interpretations of Freudianism, which was held in awe in artistic circles at the time, etc.)

For me the advice boils down to: don't worry if your plays mention dogs or include cousins just 'cause a famous author's plays do too. Which is true advice, just not that useful in bringing into the Valhalla of real art.

My advice would be: Do offend your peers and court their contempt. Almost no-one else will do this, so you can hardly help creating work that's original and which might survive with its reputation intact, which happens rarely with art.

Can someone explain what's special about the (actual) Helsinki bus station? Genuinely curious.

I googled it, and all I see is a very ordinary, modern, un-beautiful bus station, like the ones you find all over Europe, so I'm having trouble understanding why it's a "cool backdrop" or "famous" (other than the author using it as a convenient metaphor).

From the article: "The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination."

So Helsinki is an example, maybe not unique, of a bus station where it takes some time for (at least some of) the different numbered buses to diverge from a single route ("career trajectory").

But he's describing it in visual terms: "the Helsinki bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabes". Here, "cool backdrop" implies that a lot of photographers shoot it because it looks cool. But I get the sense from the article overall that he's thinking of the bus stop in purely metaphorical terms, so the language is confusing.

That's just an artful aside; he then brings us back to the real reason he's bringing it up, which is the transit system pattern rather than the station itself. (And, the transit system pattern is not uncommon but also not quite universal either, so he went with the specific example he knew of from where he was from, I'm guessing.)

Well, going through or near said station almost every day I'd wager these points:

To me the article said the bus station is famous first for his students because he talks about it in his lessons. Here in Helsinki we like to think that the railway station has some merit on international scale, bus station by itself doesn't rate that much (and those are disappearing underground anyway).

From artistic point of view (I only shoot with phone camera)... It's a bus station servicing east and north eastern lines. It gets travelers from airport train in addition of near and far going trains. Also, underneath is metro station, other side of the railway station is another bus station for north to westward lines (additional western lines are close by though that one is underground).

So, lot's of different people going through which affords various views against backdrops of various (to me spectacular) specimens of Jugend architecture through (particularly nasty example of) concrete brutalism (which writer neglects to mention for some reason..).

This applies to more than just photography.

I agree. The author starts out talking about the ubiquity of photography as a medium and then uses it more of an example to basically say that one should be prolific. I find the idea similar to the article posted last month, "Stop trying to ‘be original’ and be prolific instead" [0]

[0] http://prolifiko.com/prolific/

The advice is more specific than "Be prolific". It's "Be prolific within constraints." The former is the error of switching before you get to fluency (getting of the bus too soon).

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