Let's say a photographer shoots for an agency. He follows his favourite photographer, lets say Peter Lindbergh. He just uses an overcoat down on the beach or in some desolate backstreet. He shows the pictures. "Good but we can't use them, they look a bit, well, sort of old." Now imagine the great man PL comes in and he's shot the same images. Reaction? "Peter these pictures are marvellous we'll hang them straightaway." Why? Because his fame covers the lack of modernity, the same with Penn, Avedon, Newton and a whole host of others. They have what you don't have, fame and with it the kudos they can give to all they work with. If you want to hold yourself back just keep copying the great and the good (but dated) and slavishly reading and simply copying all those magazines. While that’s OK when you're just out of the egg following the first thing you see, I learned the hard way, photographing for a trendy London agency for their model book, that by doing the above instead of what I suggest below, what I did was GBD.

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