My own history of seeing..

 

Flickr, Part 2.

..and the heart of my desires.

The real mindblower about my revisit to Flickr has been the viewing of my Flickr Favorites via the slideshow function. Tonight they have been rolling for what seems like several hours and now it is getting late. The impulse to write about them is gripping, but instead the silent computer cursor winks back at me waiting for my thoughts to take shape and I must declare that I am finding it almost impossible right now to describe the deeply visceral effect they have had upon me.

3 days have passed since the last paragraph and I am now convinced these Flickr Favorites are, in fact, a detailed map of my unconscious mind, a giant self portrait sourced exclusively through other people's photographs. They are filled with my private thoughts and secret wishes for photography. All of them are beautiful, miraculous and improbable images which I could not ever manifest for myself, yet believe all of them to be true. My Flickr Favorites are where art has happened for me, where I have found myself transported and my consciousness expanded. Where the edges of myself and my knowing has been pushed out into new creative territories.

Without a doubt, with 147 desktop pages containing over 14,000 photographs, my Flickr Favorites are a super highway back into my own history of seeing and the heart of my desires. During my 5 year experience of Flickr, between 2008-2013, they represent today my visual education there. They track and log every photograph that stirred something in me. Being able to track and see one's own favorite photographs online, and to view those of contacts too, feels fundamental for a photography platform - it speaks to the photographer's personal aesthetic and taste and a lot can be learnt from this, but no other platform that I am aware of has this feature and it's a shame too.

Viewing my Flickr Favorites is like traveling through a wormhole in which I have loved becoming lost. Jumping from one contact's Favorite list to another can take an explorer to far off corners of the space, sometimes lighting places which we might have preferred stay hidden from us. Other times these portals take us to new and inspiring discoveries which resonate with our own work and enrich our everyday lives, which, at the end of the day, is what it is really all about..

My baby pictures of America..

 

Flickr, Part 1.

Chance pairings and happy accidents.

A month ago I decided to revisit my Flickr account which I abandoned 7 years ago. Rather than getting all nostalgic about what Flickr used to be like, back in the day, I’ll speak only briefly to it now and move on. My most interactive time spent at Flickr was between 2008-2013 and at that time I thought it was a lively place to be. There were some wonderful photographers working on personal projects and experimenting wildly. They were discovering lost archives and cutting their teeth out on the streets or in the deserts, making work that has since stood up to time and found its way off the screen and into our waking life. Supporting this was a community of (on the whole) generous spirits in enthusiastic discussion. I learnt a lot. It was also a boom time for self publishing and there was an explosion of pop up publishers printing all manner of books and zines or running websites, most of which have now long folded. About a foot of shelf space in my office holds a heady selection of these collaborations that I feel fortunate to have been a part of. 

I found my way back to Flickr to take a look at some of my old work. My baby pictures of America. It had been years since I’d seen them, especially together. I knew that time was ready to show me anything I might have missed about these photographs before and I responded by deleting over a thousand of them from my account, of which 500 remain. It is now very quiet here in my little corner of Flickr and all my housekeeping is done. It used to take me a couple of hours every day to catch up with the latest uploads and activity from my contacts, but now these updates have barely changed from one week to the next. Many of my contacts deleted their accounts or simply abandoned their posts years ago. A few still remain and they appear to somehow make it work for them.

Flickr does still have some of the best in-house tools I’ve found. The ability to view images at various sizes and in full-screen, with one click, is, I think, still the best way to view a photograph online (??). To have the option to also set each photo in your stream to a public or private view, is very helpful too, especially if you want to work on an edit behind the scenes, which is what I have been doing. All of my photo-series before 2013 were put together this way.

All files are cloud stored and can be downloaded in various sizes, including the originals which for me, who has always been on the move, finds this comforting. It has also been a pleasant experience for me to spend more time enjoying fewer photographs by what has essentially been by just a handful of photographers and over the last month I have gotten to know some of these photographers collected pictures more intimately than I have done elsewhere.

The photo organizers 'set to random’ button is still my favorite button of them all. I love it and I have not seen the likes of this click anywhere else. To be able to add a photo album to the organizing space and then radically re-order its sequence, continues to be a refreshing revelation of chance pairings and happy accidents. If you ever want to prize your image sequence apart and then have it shuffled up and reassembled in slot machine fashion, just to see what you’ve got going on, then this is the button for you.

Being part of Flickr again, if only low key, reminds me it is actually a really wonderful place for the curation of images. Whether it be for one’s own work or the work of others, Flickr encourages it, but more on this in the next post.