Rob, I understand your need for an underlying motive.
For many years, simply "look for the good pictures, print them, stick them on my wall" was a good enough purpose, a good enough plan of action. It still serves many people on LuLa perfectly well, and in a way I am a little jealous of them.
My current plan is to take some pictures and write some words and take some more pictures, more words and so on, and sometimes it comes together. And then I make a book, 1 or 2 or 20 copies. And sometimes I give those away to people who will like them, or I leave them in a coffee shop, or (very very rarely) I sell one. Is my plan better than the "stick it on a wall" plan? Not in the least. None of it matters in the long run anyways, does it? We'll all be dead in a few decades, and a few decades after that everyone who ever knew us will be dead.
My plan works for me though.
A common thread through most plans for photography, though, is one of communication. Some people may photograph purely for themselves, and far be it from me to judge them. Most, I think, have some notion of communicating something to something, at least every now and then.
It is precisely there that things like Lemagny's Clock gains some usefulness. If you want to communicate something with words well, certainly you ought to have read a lot. But in addition, having some models in mind will hurt you not at all. Whether you have read any magical realism or not, knowing that it exists gives you access to another tool. Having some little notion of the taxonomy of poems won't hurt you either. There are infinitely many ways to dissect the world of the written word, to be sure. Having some grasp of some of them gives you a better, broader, sense of the tools in the box when it comes time to tell your own story, communicate your own ideas.
You might well consider the Clock to be balderdash, or to be too limited, too narrow. But in thinking that through you expand and refine your own ideas about how photographs might communicate. You might, ever so slightly, become a better communicator-with-pictures.
There is probably a school of thought (perhaps even right here in LuLa) that says you need only look at a lot of pictures, and you'll learn all you need to know. I beg to differ. You cannot merely read poems and deduce all there is to know about rhyme and consonance and meter and symbolism. You can probably work out a lot of it, with great effort, but you will certainly miss a lot of it. On the other hand, a couple of hours with a book about poetry will lay the whole thing bare, and you will be a better poet for it.
You might as well attempt to become an engine mechanic by attending a lot of motorsports events.
Andrew, I don't buy into this because photography isn't those other, possily deeper arts: photography, for me, has two levels: the mechanical one where skills are about technique with camera and light manipulation - such as for real architectural photography - in contrast to architectural atmospherics, where the skill is all visual, in recognizing and catching mood on the fly. That's the
instinctive photography that I like, draws me in and was all I ever wanted to be able to do.
This was especially evident at the more artsy edges of fashion photography where, to name but a few, people like Sarah Moon, Deborah Turbeville, Harri Peccinotti, Hans Feurer operate(ed). On the other side of the genre, I think that photography with the advent of digital has, rather than extend the boundaries, actually turned around and gone the other way, back to the styles of the old guys with their 4x5 etc. where every stitch counts. That's fashion: in today, out tomorow and back up and in like Lazarus the day after that.
It's all pretty superficial and always for the moment, with no real pretentions to anything deeper. And that's one of the leading branches of photography. As for the rest - you get war junkies out in the life/death wars, and the faux ones out on the streets; you get the folks who chastise their bodies by climbing mountains or othewise flagellate themselves by camping out in deserts. They come home with what? Photographs. So? And that's my point: the snaps make an exhibition or, with luck, a book, and once seen that's about all anyone's interest will take. But, if you consider the other arts such as poetry and music, they touch the same hearts for as long as they can beat. Very, very few photographs have had that power over me, but several photographers do because of the body of work, which simply makes them artists and not one-hit wonders.
That power has almost nothing to do with anything they learned in schools, but everything to do with how they see and dream.
I always advocate looking at all the photographs that you can, if you are really keen enough on photography, not to copy a single one, but to discover yourself therein, find your bag, what turns you on, and then you'll have a pretty good idea of what you may want to do. All photography is not created equal for the same person.
That said and pondered, it still comes down to the fact that photography is always a minor player. Sure, some make pots of money out of galleries, but money alone doesn't make the stuff any the more wonderful, just collectible.
