“Last month, the New York-based photographer Sze Tsung Leong was on location in La Paz, Bolivia, when he received a phone message from his New York gallerist, Yossi Milo. It had come to Milo’s attention that a Canadian photographer was exhibiting a series of works in Vancouver that bore a striking similarity to an ongoing series by Leong. An image of the Canale della Giudecca in Venice? The Canadian photographer had it, and from the same perspective as Leong’s. A cracking ice floe in Iceland? An Egyptian pyramid? A Japanese shrine? He had those, too, all cropped and composed in similar fashion.” (LA Times)
In looking at the pictures by Leong and Burdeny, it would be hard to refute the similarities. From a financial perspective, I can see how Leong would want to protect images he sees as distinctly his from being reproduced in any way and sold. This is understandable.
The issue for me here becomes the photographs themselves. Each image is simply boring and uninspired. The aesthetic issue arises when I look at one of these photographs and am not struck at all by any Barthesian “punctum”, but instead by a cultural boredom. The photographs, even when I viewed the Leong original for the first time already felt like something I had seen time and time again. Now, this could be a greater symptom of a culture saturated with images where reproductions and originals become blurred and sense that everything that can be created in art has already been made. That argument here would be lazy and an attempt to cover up the qualities lacking in these images. They are completely unremarkable and now the only interesting thing about them is their apparent controversy.
