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.