Just finished "reading" a Saul Leiter book and....

 

London Café, 2009. Marc Olivier (definitely not Saul Leiter)

...well,  do you ever see something inspired and it just makes you want to create—almost as a form of applause? After I finished going through Saul Leiter's Early Color, which has got to be one of my top 10 favorite photo books, I had to look on my computer and see if I had anything with that sort of moody, urban, color-drenched, reflective, ghost-of-a-human-presence feel. This late-night photo of a London café is the best I could come up with at 2 a.m. I put it here not because I think it's particularly great, but because it's my way of wrapping up a great read of a beautiful photobook. I suppose it's also an example of "ex post facto influence"—the term I've decided to give that phenomenon where a current influence helps you appreciate a photo you had previously overlooked. In this case, I suddenly appreciate those shadowy figures passing by the doors at the back of the image. So, there's my humble applause.

Ex post facto influence

Paris, 2011

To quote Wikipedia, "An ex post facto law (from the Latin for "from after the action") or retroactive law is a law that retroactively changes the legal consequences (or status) of actions committed or relationships that existed prior to the enactment of the law."

I'm adopting the Latin term to describe retroactive influence, specifically, an influence that affects the way you assess a photo that you have already taken. 

Have you ever looked at a photo you once ignored and reassessed it in light of work you had appreciated elsewhere? That is what happened to me today. I was sorting through some Paris photos for a project and my eyes stopped when I came across the photo above, not because it was what I needed for the project but rather because it made me think about the following Saul Leiter photos I had been looking at the night before:

 photos via (ana)logbook

Not that my photo is as good as Leiter's or that it was inspired by him at the time I took it. Two immediate differences: 1. there is no human presence in my photo and 2. the tones in my photo are less warm and saturated. In Leiter's photos, the angle of the hand or of the head draws in the viewer's eye. The slight glimpse of humanity haunts the photos. It makes me wish someone had been sitting in that blue car when I took my photo.

But my point is that I might never have noticed my photo today (which, although it is no Leiter work of art, still really pleases my eye) had I not been admiring Leiter's work last night.

Last night I had been thinking how I would like to do some photos inspired by Leiter. Today, I realized that I already had—retroactively. And that, dear reader, is my tale of ex post facto influence.