Is this new? Flickr (my constant obsession) is peppered with tribute groups of various sorts, among them some devoted to the work of famous photographers. These are hard to pin down using Flickr's group search facilities, so those that I've encountered are what I've stumbled into while riding my own particular hobby horses. You can search for individual names and find the groups that mention a specific photographer in their descriptions, but that doesn't necessarily make them "tribute" groups. Still... a little concerted effort by searching on the names of various famous photographers (famous to ME anyway, so maybe we're actually talking about photographers who were famous about a decade ago) pulled up these results, presented in order of apparent popularity with the number of groups in which they are cited:
Cartier Bresson - 104
Ansel Adams - 89
Robert Frank - 80
William Eggleston - 44
Gary Winogrand - 32
Walker Evans - 29
Diane Arbus - 28
Martin Parr - 19
Elliot Erwitt - 10
Lee Friedlander - 8
Sally Mann - 5
Edward Burtynski - 3
In all of these cases the majority of the groups appear to be devoted to some style of which one of these photographers, typically along with a number of others, is an exemplar. But for all the photographers named above there are groups specifically devoted to pictures that are "influenced" by them. While I have my share of pictures in a number of these groups, it's more a matter of seeing something in my work that fits the promoted style. (In other words, I'm spamming them in a pathetic attempt to get people to look at my pictures.) But clearly there are people who walk around trying to take Winogrand or Friedlander or Eggleston pictures, and I'm really both intrigued and put-off by it. From a description for a Sally Mann group:
A tribute to one of the greats who defined not only a style of photography but a mood. Her haunting portraits of children and young people do not feel like photographs, but it is as if you are seeing what is in a child's heart and mind. As if they are looking to you and showing you their angst, love, maturity, and spirit.
and then the kicker:
Color accepted. Black and white preferred. (as, evidently, children prefer to emote in black and white).
In fairness, some of these groups take an interesting pedagogical/critical approach, attempting to deconstruct the style of their namesake in order to make better sense of it. (Didn't I do this kind of thing with my friends in bars back in the 70's? I honestly can't remember whether I tried to emulate Winogrand or just got depressed at the futility of trying.) And at their best, the members of these groups produce fascinating anecdotes, rarely seen images, and mini-essays that can be surprisingly lucid and informative. Of course, at other times they're just parochial (see above vis. color vs. B&W).
In the end, this seems related to a broader cultural phenomenon: the leveling of technological barriers to the appreciation of historical works of art that are, themselves dependent on technology. It's easy to appreciate musical recordings from about 1955 on. Not so easy for music recorded earlier than that. It's easy for younger generations to appreciate films made after the use of color became routine. It's not just that technology like the web makes things more accessible as in Easier to Find, but that at some point, for many media, a threshold was passed where it became unnecessary to make an effort to see or hear past an obtrusive technological barrier -- the rendering became "good enough" to appreciate the work on its own merits and within the context of the culture that produced it, however long ago.
Or did it? Now that everything in "film" is CGI, and anybody with a PC or Mac can multi-track any number of instruments, which themselves can be synthesized pretty convincingly, will REAL film start seeming as alien and imperfect as work produced on the other side of the technical threshold?
Sheesh. What the HELL am I talking about?
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