The worst thing you can say to a photographer is that you already seen his photo a million times.
We are constantly battling for attention, and creativity and originality are key.
We keep trying to photograph something that nobody else does, while still trying to make it visually appealing.
But its never easy... we live in the digital era, where everyone has a camera on their pocket... "how the hell do I photograph something that no one already did? Everything that was worth being photograph already was photographed!"

You are wrong... there are things... you just cant see them!

One of my favourite photography authors is Ralph Hattersley and he resolves this "problem" with a beautiful phrase...

“We (photographers) are making photographs to understand what our lives mean to us.”

I know I know... thats an awesome quote but... what does this have to do with photographing something unique?
The problem is... you don´t understand the quote to the fullest of it´s meaning...

To see what others can´t you have to live in your own reality

The photo above is called "Iron on Fire", from the photographer Ricardo Rangel. He was a Mozambican photographer that photographed during and before the Portuguese Colonial War.
Basically, Mozambique was a Portuguese territory, and they decided (or should I say the president António Oliveira Salazar decided) it would be an awesome idea if black people at Mozambique were slaves... this then resulted in the Portuguese Colonial War and Mozambique got its independence.
But before their independence, Mozambican people were slaves for so long that their reality and values became deformed... to say the least...
It was normal for Mozambican to be slaves. It was completly normally correct, for example, for a black Mozambican boy to be burned with hot steel when he didn´t performe his duties for their white master to the Mozambican people! That was their reality! (this is the photo above...)
And nobody would photograph that... that´s completly normal, that happens every day... that´s just the reality of things... well... it wans´t the reality of Ricardo Rangel and so he kept photographing "normal."

Like a door of a bathroom... whats so special about a bathroom? It´s just a normal bathroom right? Oh... it just has the small detail that it´s divided in "Servents and Man!" (has it is written on the doors in portuguese.
Again, this is completly outrageous to us nowadays, but at the time... this was just a bathroom... just a regular bathroom... to understand the visionary genious of this photographer you have to keep yourself reminded of that... you are seeing a reality of a man that lived in a absolutly different universe than us!
He trully photographed to understand his lifes meaning... to understand he wanst a slave! To understand that this bubble he was living in didnt represent him...

...and all of us live in a Bubble!

Some like to think that our society is perfect. Others like to think that its not, but they see all the problems that exist in it.
History shows us that this is a fallacy. Maybe some of us know all the problems in the world, and maybe some photographers are catching those moments for us to see in the future and be discosted of how dumb we were in the past... thats what makes a photographer a visionary and thats how you take photos that nobody else ever took... just think about it differently.
In the words of one of my photography teachers once said:

"Sometimes I dont sleep thinking of the things I didnt saw and that were right in front of me."

Thanks for reading :)
Photos Source