Hungarian photographer Balazs Pataki is widely recognized for his portraits of individuals within the contexts that define them: family, politics, ethnicity, and class. Some of his photographs re-create images from other famous photographers such as Annie Leibowitz and Ruth Orkin.  These images assume the viewer recognizes the original and can recognize the values, ideas, and artistic strategies in the way Pataki adapts them. Examine the image by Orkin in the previous reading, and then answer the questions that follow this photograph.

Reading

http://1x.com/photo/32202/portfolio/17030

Questions

1. 1.How has Pataki re-created the photograph by Ruth Orkin?  What are the major visual differences between Orkin’s photograph and Pataki’s?
   

2. 2.Writers often paraphrase another writer’s work to convey the original writer’s ideas or information.  Is Pataki’s image a visual paraphrase, or is it an original work?
   

3. 3.Does Pataki rely on the viewer’s knowledge and understanding of the history of photography in his image? How do the limits of the viewer’s knowledge limit her/his understanding of what he has created?
   

4. 4.How do the limits of the viewer’s knowledge determine the judgment of the photograph’s originality?
   

5. 5.Pataki’s work can be seen as an argument about the nature of originality? What does the images imply about originality? How do you infer that argument?