How to Become the Next Big Thing in Finland (and the Arts)
Let's talk about how the Helsinki Bus Station Theory of Creativity
You’re standing at a bay at the Helsinki Bus Station, waiting to board a bus. Don’t ask me how you got here in this fantasy scenario, but you’re there all the same. Just go with it, as they say, because the end result of doing so might be a whole new understanding of how wrong you’ve been in your approach to your development as an artist.
So, there you are, collar turned up against the brisk winter wind whipping around you. In your gloved hand is an art portfolio heavy with your most exciting work. All around you, buses arrive and depart, more than one thousand every day. You could board any of the outgoing buses because they all go to the same place you are before their routes begin to diverge - and so you do.
One kilometer later, you see your stop ahead and press the call button with your knuckle to avoid germs (you’re not an idiot, after all; people are gross). Outside, the snow on the ground is thick. You trudge through it to the gallery where you’re meant to show your work to a curious curator. Once inside, you heave your portfolio onto a large table where it lands with a dramatic slap. You then unzip it, flip it open, and wait as its contents are carefully inspected.
The curator seems to appreciate your nudes – which you explain you’ve produced over the past three years – but there’s hesitation on her face. She turns to you and gently asks if you’re familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. They’re already on display at this gallery.
Frustrated by being a Johnny-come-lately, you take a cab back to the tiny apartment where you live as you strive to become The Next Big Thing in the art world. You spend another three years studying the latest work catching galleries’ attention, improving your own in the process, and building a new portfolio you’re sure will do the trick. Fame and fortune will soon be yours.
You then return to Helsinki Bus Station, board another bus, and get off at the same gallery…except the curator reacts to your work in the same way, showing you other artists’ work that is indistinguishable from yours. Crushed, despair playing across your face at the glaring evidence of your unoriginality, you ask the curator for advice. You’re desperate to develop your own authentic voice – but others living in Helsinki, others like you, keep ending up here, at this same gallery, with the same “authentic” voice.
The curator walks you to the door, points at the bus stop outside, and says, “Next time, stay on the fucking bus, kid.”
Let me explain…
In June of 2004, Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen delivered the commencement speech at the New England School of Photography. He stepped up to the microphone, cast his gaze across the students looking back at him — all of them desperate to become The Next Big Thing — and shared with them what he believed made all the difference between success and failure in the arts or, really, in any field.
Minkkinen’s commencement speech is now referred to as The Helsinki Bus Station Theory.
Here is the speech’s most relevant text for you to read yourself:
There is a bus station in Helsinki I want to introduce you to. A bus station just next to Eliel Saarinen’s famous train station. Surrounded by Jugenstil architectural gems like the National Theater and the National Art Museum, the bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabees armed with D-SLRs and vintage Leicas. You might find yourself there some time, too.
But getting back to the bus station and what makes it famous, at least among the students I teach – at UMass Lowell, the University of Art & Design Helsinki, École d’Art Appliqués in Lausanne, or the many workshops I give in Tuscany, Maine and Santa Fe – is the metaphor it offers students and professionals alike for creative continuity in a life-long journey in photography, the metaphor it provides to young artists seeking to discover their own unique vision one day.
The Helsinki Bus Station – let me describe what happens there.
Some two dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19. Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer, stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.
Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity. Okay, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it Bus #21. You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, Bus 58, and so on. Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years, others have already done.
So, you hop off the bus, grab a cab – because life is short – and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform. This time you are going to make 8×10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane.
You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that elicit the same comment: “Haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach?” Or, if they are steamy black and white 8×10 camera views of palm trees swaying off a beachfront: “Haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?”
So, once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back, and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others.
What to do?
It’s simple: stay on the bus.
Stay on the fucking bus.
Why? Because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
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. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, Bus 19 southwest. For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail with one another, but soon they split off as well. Irving Penn is headed elsewhere.
It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire – that’s why you chose that platform after all – it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly, your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it. Your vision takes off. And as the years mount up and your work begins to pile up, it won’t be long before the critics become very intrigued – not just by what separates your work from a Sally Mann or a Ralph Gibson, but by what you did when you first got started!
You regain the whole bus route, in fact. The vintage prints made twenty years ago are suddenly re-evaluated, and for what it is worth, start selling at a premium.
At the end of the line – where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee – that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces – all with the stamp of your unique vision.
Why? Because you stayed on the bus.
When I began photography, I was enamored with the work of Ralph Gibson, Duane Michals, and Jerry Uelsmann. I was on their platforms. Each told me that it was possible to use your mind to make pictures. As a copywriter on the Minolta account – before I became a photographer – I wrote, “What happens inside your mind can happen inside a camera.” I took that credo and made it my own. Not with multiple images like Uelsmann or in sequences like Michals. But it was Ralph Gibson’s images that haunted me.
There was this one picture, in particular, of hands coming up over the prow of boat he made in 1970 that I loved. I had a picture of my foot coming over the prow of a Finnish rowboat the other way made in 1976. I am sure his image had inspired mine even though I wasn’t thinking about it when I made my picture.
In 1989, there was a show in Antibes called Three Masters of the Surreal with Eikoh Hosoe, the great Japanese master, Ralph Gibson, and humbly, myself. At the party after the vernissage, I told Ralph about my trepidations when I first began photography. He nodded his head and said, “When I first saw your work” – this was in 1975 or thereabouts – “I had that feeling of something familiar.” But then he was quick to add, “But you know, it didn’t take you long to find your way.”
I had found the difference.
Ralph went on to photograph women and walls, color and surreal light. I continued my bus route less haunted, more assured.
So, our best chance of making our voice and vision heard is to find that common attribute by which the work can be recognized, by which audiences are made curious. It can happen early, as my teacher Harry Callahan stated it: “You never get much better than your first important works. And they come soon.”
At an auction in London at Sotheby’s a few years back, one of my pieces came up for bidding. It shows my upside-down face with mouth wide open on a boardwalk in Narragansett, Rhode Island. When the auctioneer announced the piece, certainly he or she didn’t describe it as a student work – which, in fact, it was. I had made it for Harry’s class.
And it is why I teach. Teachers who say, “Oh, it’s just student work,” should maybe think twice about teaching.
Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.
And so, if your heart is set on 8×10 platinum landscapes in misty southern terrains, work your way through those who inspire you, ride their bus route, and damn those who would say you are merely repeating what has been done before. Wait for the months and years to pass and soon your differences will begin to appear with clarity and intelligence, when your originality will become visible, even the works from those very first years of trepidation when everything you did seemed so done before.
We can do a whole lot of things in art, become ten different artists, but if we do that, there is great danger that we will communicate very little in the end.
I say, ride the bus of your dreams and stay the course.
Long story short: in striving to become an original, you might actually be setting yourself back on your creative journey. Perhaps the route to originality comes from first imitating others and pretending otherwise only handicaps us.
As Salvador Dalí said, “Those who do not want to imitate anything, produce nothing.”
And if you produce nothing, how will you ever find out if you have anything truly original to say?
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This was a wonderful long form metaphor! Thanks for sharing it in its entirety. I thank you for the insights.
Most singers I like have a unique voice, literally. With writers that seems much to me to be much more rare. It's there. It's one reason I read writers who create series of books.
Great post, Cole. This quote rings true from my experience. “Georges Braque has said that out of limited means, new forms emerge. I say we find out what we will do by knowing what we will not do.”
I dare say imitation of those we admire is as old as human activity. All the great composers certainly did it before branching off, and of course The Beatles transformation from Buddy Holly/Carl Perkins wannabes to the greatest innovators in popular music.