Shooting Wide Open

I can’t believe I just spent a night writing this instead of scanning while watching Big Love (awesome show), but I’ll take some solace in the fact that I got Joerg to put the word “chipmunk” in a subject title.

First off, let’s clarify a bit. Don’t read too much into the chipmunks! I was looking for an excuse to show the Star Wars chipmunk. I admit the images and text in my posts aren’t always closely wedded. It’s fair to say that if I don’t mention the photographer by name in the body of the post, the image(s) aren’t very tightly connected to the ideas in the text. Sometimes I do it to break up the monotony of the text and give readers a few easily identifiable landmarks. I’m going to do this right now. Since this discussion includes La Pura Vida, let’s take a look at Bryan Formhals’ work as we proceed, shall we?

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE CHIPMUNK

So. Our chipmunk is not an example of public art or vernacular art. Art is not the point, which is precisely my point. It is just an example of someone putting together a group of other people’s images for public view, an example of how photography is used for different purposes that don’t necessarily need to be art-related to be ultimately beneficial to the art photo community. Having a public that is excited about photography in all its forms is a good thing for art photography in general in my mind. The issue for me is not whether Flickr is full of snapshots or if artists use it. I agree with Bryan over at lapuravida that it’s very difficult to define what Flickr is since, like the net, it is just an empty template into which individuals can pour anything. I have no doubt that this is mostly true:

flickr it’s just a massive thing. Nobody can just diss it like that. Probably a quarter or half of the photographers we’ll talk about in the future are now or have been there at some point. I think that the whole thing is just starting. Now it has been brewing for a while, and the first photographers and curators are getting out of it into the world. Those exhibitions, books, etc. will have nothing to do with flickr, but flickr has just been the yeast in the process. You’re not looking at it to find the best of the photographers that you already know. You’re looking at it to try to figure out who out of those millions of users you’ll know in a decade.
- Joni Karanka

However, I’m making a broader statement that we should look at Flickr neither as the breeding grounds for new artists or a pool of vernacular photos for artists to draw on, but as a forum for generally getting the public excited about photography in a way that museums can’t. This is done by the interaction, the large number of searchable photos and also the presence of working fine artists, amateur fashion photogs, sports fanatics and what have you. You can be inspired by photos in the MOMA, but you can’t do anything about it, not really, in the MOMA. Flickr on the other hand, is an open DIY invitation. You see something you like, well, sign up and join in. That’s not to say that the point of museums or galleries isn’t to get people excited about and doing photography, but Flickr is built so that interaction and passive gazing occur in the same space.

There really is something for everyone on Flickr. I think we actually all agree on this point. You can find your own level – if you want to post family snapshots and limit your interaction to your own family and friends, you can. If you want to grow up to be just like Dave the Strobist, you can. And so on with fashion, wildlife, landscapes, sports, street, fine art, etc. The percentage of photos that fall into these different “genres” on Flickr probably mirrors the percentage of photos in these genres in the larger world in general. So in that view, fine art is in fact still a small slice of the pie. That’s no surprise.

I threw a monkey wrench into my own argument by tacking on that last paragraph, which was really a lead-in for another issue, and the unfortunate choice of the word “curate.” Edit and group are more accurate terms. I am talking broadly about the skill of parsing sequences or series of images, which is related to the skill of parsing images much as parsing sentences is a step up from parsing words.

Bryan Formhals

KILLING THE TROLLS

I do agree with Joerg that the bulk of the discussions on Flickr tend to be about gear, how to be a pro and technique, and are laced with trollish remarks. But those remarks are really just a part of everyday life. Let’s not pretend that every discussion we have in person with a sizable group of people is rational and orderly and even-tempered. It’s just that all the snitty little remarks get recorded permanently which makes them that much more intrusive, but at least on the web you can just skip over comments made by trolls. In real life you actually have to listen to them, or deal with their blather.

Though you get the inevitable pointless ones, I like the comments function. It’s the easiest thing we have these days, and it’s getting better. I can’t think of a site off the top of my head, but now there are ways for a community to render trollish comments invisible by collective vote. This way, you end up with only the comments that most people find worthwhile and you don’t really need one moderator to do this intensively – only everyone to click a helpful/unhelpful button as they’re reading. Of course, this only works with sizeable communities, but actually, I bet it’d work okay if you even had ten loyal readers who regularly voted, depending on how sensitive your visibility threshold is.

Misunderstandings of tone and intent happen a lot online, but part of this comes out of a limitation of technology. For example, there’s gotta be a way to pull these related blog posts together into a more easily readable and respondable (?) form so that I don’t have to open 10 tabs to keep up, without removing them completely. But we’re not quite there yet. I’m hoping the more modular, data-oriented semantic web will make some of this easier. I think you guys are arguing on different planes, about different points. When it comes to the subject of Flickr and the vernacular we all have some easily pushed buttons that when the subject pops up, we tend to harp on. I do it. This is not just a feature of web discussions either.

In my experience, the majority of conversational exchanges over course of a typical day are likely pretty inconsequential, unless you are the lucky bastard that lives among people who have idea diarrhea. I’m missing the smalltalk gene, so I wish the day consisted of one intense debate after another, but realistically, I’ve learned that there’s no way to expect that from other people. It’s just not feasible anywhere, so I’ve developed a tolerance for offhanded remarks, smart alek comments and the inevitable snarky intrusions.

Bryan Formhals

CIVILIZED DISCOURSE: AN EXAMPLE

Actually, I use Flickr now more for the forums than for the pictures. There are groups where more civilized heads prevail. I favor Utata. The pool is pretty typical Flickr. The group’s strength is how well it’s run. Many people have been there for years, so they’ve gotten to know each other, which always helps keep the trolling down. Aside from basic civility, rules are few – there are no genre, gear, or theme restrictions. There are weekly participatory exercises/assignments. Greg writes up a new fine art photographer twice a month – look at this formidible list! It is not comprehensive, but it is nothing to scoff at, considering he used to do it every week in addition to picking some of the assignments, publishing said assignments, culling feature photos for the Utata website proper, writing the occasional text for the front page and being active in everyday discussions, sometimes stepping in when things take on a nasty tone. He shares these tasks with other mods. Behold, a collective with 16 moderators, 17,000 members and nearly 9,000 discussion topics that hasn’t fallen into complete chaos.

Right now there’s a discussion on vegetarianism and slow food, and not long before, there was heated debate over the new development in the Shepard Fairey case (started by yours truly, no less). All sorts of bizarre things pop up. (Cloaca Machines or blink reminder glasses?) I think the amateur/hobbyist nature of the group makes it more laid back and pleasant. I look into more hardcore groups and there are just too many ideological debates for me. Utata is just a nice place to ask a question without being jumped on and picked apart. All this civility might make it too nice for some, but I think it’s a nice place for a beginner to explore without feeling the need to jump on either side of any given argument. The natives are friendly and funny. The group doesn’t have everything but of course, you can supplement with other groups, even start your own.

I think of it has most successful long term relationships – not every moment is fire or peace or happiness, but you know what, it works. 1/6th of the time is really awesome, 3/6ths is good, 1/6th is annoying little things that as much your problem as his, and 1/6th is some serious problems to work through. But what have you got to complain about? 5/6ths of the time you’ve got no problems, you’re not going to break up. (Loosely spun off a study that showed that couples who were negative to each other for more than 1/6th of their interaction time tended to break up.)

But I digress. It takes time to find a community that you’re comfortable with. The thing about the web is that even though it’s a different medium, all the same rules pretty much still apply. You need to reach out to others for others to become interested in you. It takes a while before people respond to and get to know you. Disagreements will arise and there will be drama. It takes time and effort before you really get anything truly rewarding out of it, and at some point, especially if you’re interested in fine art, it’s more efficient to leave Flickr for the world of the blogs and online magazines to see the work you’re most interested in.

I can imagine that if I had been as savvy about what was available online in the blogosphere then as I am now, it might’ve been harder to dig through Flickr, but at the time I was feeling my way around, I had a lot to learn from a wider range of photographs, and I didn’t mind looking at everything I could get my eyes on. I managed to find my way to some contacts whose work I admire (Li Wei, Mu Ge, Lung S. Liu, among others) and it’s a lot easier to hop into a crowd familiar with the history of photography from this point.

Bryan Formhals

NEW WORK, UNFINISHED WORK

One great and unique thing about Flickr – the work keeps pouring in. When I’m learning, I personally feel the need to look at a lot of photos, and sometimes the work featured on portfolio sites and blogs is too periodic. Once or twice a year, if that, photographers release new work. I simply need to look at far more than that to speed up the learning process, and Flickr is perfect for this. All photographers are connected to a web of other photographers, so if I ever feel that I’ve exhausted my pool of contacts, I can trawl my contacts’ contacts or favorites to find new stuff. Also, as someone trying to figure out my own optimal process, it’s better to engage with a group of people who are constantly showing new work rather than a finished, edited portfolio. It helps me feel motivated to shoot new stuff and I get to see the editing process to some extent, of other photographers. This is something that is entirely missing from the museum and artist website models of seeing work.

I suspect that one of the main reasons Flickr isn’t always taken seriously is a practical one – do you want to show potential colleagues and employers outtakes or work that you might ultimately decide isn’t good enough? For art directors or buyers I can see how this is the main problem – streams are just a mash of personal snapshots and serious work (if there is a distinction to be made). Do the snapshots make employers nervous about ability? Or perhaps mostly it’s just a matter of not having the time to look through hundreds of photos. One complaint I do have about Flickr is that for a photo sharing site, it sure doesn’t give you versatile options for display.

Bryan Formhals

A little later in the week I want to address the issue of elitism vs populism and more importantly, our tendency to make these classifications in the first place, but I felt we had to shoo that chipmunk out of the room. It’s gone now, poor thing!