skrubu

I think that people who claim Flickr to be dead or bash the service for not being social enough don’t really get what Flickr is about.

Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.
–
Albert Einstein

Ok, I do agree,that Flickr could have a tad (or a lot) better UI for viewing the images, but a UI has never been a hinder for people when they really want something. I mean, if it was up to the UI nobody would’ve used MySpace, ever. Yet it was hugely popular (and is still a good place to find music from bands not featured elsewhere). And yes, the times are different now, and among all new fads, new hangouts, shiny bright UIs and gimmicks Flickr is as it has been for a long while (there has been some changes and upgrades recently which the ones declaring the death of Flickr forget to mention) but change, even though we have been conditioned to believe so, is not an intrinsic value.

Flickr is not about you as a person. It’s not about being social and hang out with whoever publishes images on the web (which is about everybody and their cousins and pets), frankly that’s why there’s sites like Facebook or Google+. If you crave social recognition Flickr isn’t the place for you.

Flickr is all about the photo. The social part is not the main issue, the pictures are, and in that way Flickr is very much still the king. The people publishing images on Flickr are, I think, subordinate to the images. The thing with Flickr, what makes it good, is the joy of finding and discovering pictures. Something that you achieve only by being an active viewer and not just by pushing your own pics out in the wide open internet.

Going through the favorite images of someone who favorited one of your images is a hoot and gives you a broader sense of somebody else’s visual thinking than only looking at the images they themselves publish – and that is nothing a chunk of code can do. In that sense yes, Flickr is old fashioned. It doesn’t just offer you off the shelf recommendations that some programmer or planner who doesn’t know you thinks might interest you. You need to do something yourself! And that makes Flickr a really tough place for social media diluted mental self pollutionists with their fizzy drinks and pizzas (or low carb raw food smoothies) to survive in. You need to have the patience, you know not eat your marshmallows at once.

Compared to Flickr, Facebook and Google+ are like the television while Flickr is like a big photo album that doesn’t open up for the impatient, lazy or the one’s mesmerized by effects and whatnot tech stuff. You got to work for it and follow your own instincts. Be there, be active, do things – all that stuff that Facebook has taken, automated, mashed up and now spoon-feeds us as an endless flow of everything and a bit more.

I publish my photos on the net mostly under the Creative Commons (CC) license BY-NC-SA which means that I let you remix, tweak, and build upon my work non-commercially (NC), as long as you credit me (BY) and license your new creations under the identical terms (SA, ie. Share Alike). And because my photos are there for the taking I try to keep an eye on where my creative work travels, mostly because I’m quite intrigued by what interests people.

Some time ago I noticed that my Flickr account got a noticeable amount of traffic from Aol Travel, both from the front page and an article. I naturally decided to look into this.

It turns out that Aol Travel has an article about worlds grossest foods and they used my image of a century egg as the main image. The image isn’t there anymore, and I’ll tell you why.

You see, I was of course a bit annoyed that this Big Giant Corporation was using my image commercially, but that wasn’t really the issue for me (and they, quite correctly, had a proper attribution). I was actually more interested in if the people there really understood what the BY-NC-SA license of my image meant for them and their work.

So I tried to contact the author via twitter a couple of times, to no avail. Nor were the few attempts to contact Aol Travel via twitter any good either. It seems that this is a company that utilizes social media in an archaic way as a one way broadcasting platform.

Only after I contacted Aol Travel via their official feedback form on the site, did I get noticed. To my query concerning if Aol Travel understood the meaning of the license (including a statement that I’m not angry and that there’s no need to remove my image) the answer from the author, and assistant editor, was short: ”Thank you for contacting us. As a courtesy, we have replaced your photo in this post.”

Ok. I can only guess what happened in their end but I presume I’m not the first one contacting Aol Travel concerning the usage of photos. And they acted as the Big Giant Corporation they are by sending a standard issue answer and removing my image. Less trouble (and sweat) for them and no need to act human.

I replied to Aol’s answer by explaining to them, that all CC images aren’t there just for the taking, since some come with restrictions, some with obligations and some with both. I also told them that removing my image doesn’t change the fact that they still are left both NC and SA licensed images in their article, and some images that need to licensed for use via Getty Images. I still haven’t heard from Aol, but then again I really didn’t expect that to happen either. And they haven’t returned my image back to the article, even though I in my mail granted them the right to use my photo in their article.

Now, about a month later, it seems, all SA images are gone and only NC and Getty licensed images are left.

I wonder what Aol Travel would have done if I’d never contacted them but actually just acted upon the Share Alike part of my (or, for that matter, anybody else’s) CC licensed image used and assumed that Aol’s article (regardless to their copyright notice) was free for me to remix, tweak, and build upon as long as I attribute them and share my derivative work alike?

What I love about the Creative Commons licensing is the fact that it isn’t just a tool for prohibiting (and hitting others in the head), but comes with obligations for the one that uses the images. If you take of mine, you have to give too – sounds like common sense. That’s probably very difficult for corporations to understand and that’s why I wanted know if the people of Aol Travel understood what it’s all about. Perhaps somebody there now understands. And understands too, that asking, when in doubt, especially when you’re a commercial player, never hurts. Some might say no, some yes, but in the long run it will pay to be polite.

(BTW, speaking of tweaking Aol’s article: Chinese urine-soaked eggs are probably more disgusting (even just as a thought) than any of the foods they have listed in their article and freshly ground and brewed Kopi Luwak is really great.)

Century Egg

I was thinking about this thing about restricting photography in public places. I think it’s sad in many ways but mostly it is sad because it means giving in. Let me explain.

These days you see a lot of talk about terrorism in every conceivable type of media. The aim of terrorism per definition is to create terror, fear. This fear is the fear about things you cannot control but which can have a big negative impact on things in your life. Big things, huge fear of the unknown, the uncontrollable danger that lurks everywhere and can strike at any moment unannounced. That is very scary indeed.

The restriction of photography in public places feeds this exactly same fear of the big dangerous unknown. It works in the same way as the threat of terrorism, with the only difference being that it’s not implemented by some strangers from outside one’s own culture or social circle, but by one’s own nation, own people. It is the fear that trickles from the powers that be into the minds of every citizen. It is a message from our leaders, and it tells us to be afraid. We have to give in, and fear the unknown.

Now, think about it, if you would like to sow fear into a group of people, wouldn’t it be best to turn peers against each other, to find a threat within the group so that the group starts controlling and restricting itself and its members? That’d be the ultimate deed of terrorism, terror feeding terror.

True, a bomb here, a plane crash there does get the media attention, wreak havoc and generate fear, but it also bumps up national pride, which fuels the fight response and might make people mentally stronger. A fear of harmful actions that can be taken by anyone anywhere is a fear without a specific target or face, or perhaps the face of someone you know, which is absolutely horrible in many ways. That’s a big fear, and that fear lurks not only near big internationally known targets, but also in small villages, on every street, in your neigbourhood, next door from you… perhaps even in your own home. How do you fight that? How do you fight a possible enemy hiding in plain view in your own community? Either you don’t fight it, which makes you look like a quitter and people start thinking you’re supporting this unknown menace, or then you fight it and at the same time spread more fear and paranoia in your own community. It’s a lose-lose situation for ordinary people, but a huge win for the ones that want to control.

I mean, if I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t go around taking pictures. Nope. I’d be the one telling people that taking pictures in public is something to be feared, something that shouldn’t be done and something that needs surveillance, preferably by every citizen. You know, go around actively planting more and more seeds of fear into people. It wouldn’t be as fast as a bomb, but certainly more destructive in the long run.

But I’m not a terrorist. I take pictures and believe that is good thing.

And I suppose that is the mark of any great photography – it escapes the photography ghetto and becomes relevant to the wider world.
–
Colin Pantall: The New Ruins of Great Britain, John Davies, Jem Southam and Bristol’s collapsing luxury flats

(via Conscientious)

I disagree.

I think it is a fallacy to think of great photography as the one that escapes the ”photography ghetto” or that there even is a ghetto. It’s a fallacy created by scarcity of information.

Yes, there is photography that exceptionally many people find appealing, even to the degree that some photographs or photographers become accepted over cultural, religious or geographical boundaries. But then there’s also a lot of photography that many find appealing but that doesn’t break through on a global level, maybe not even on a national or local level either.

But fame and/or money does not great photography make. Nor does absence of fame or money turn photography into garbage. That model of thinking is based on either fame or business goals being the key issue in photography.

Fame is the fairy tale everyone wants live. It’s what we’ve been conditioned to by the professionally controlled medias. It’s the winning of the game, being the the king of the hill, having others looking up to you. It’s the way out of the gutter to glory and money. For a minimally few. The stars, the elite. The ones we celebrate and want to be like.

The thing is that to become famous you need to be on the radar and be liked by the right people, at the right time. For van Gogh (not a photographer, but a good example) this happened after he was dead. Now his works sell for huge sums, but when he was alive… well, the story wasn’t that great, was it. But did he paint bad images or did he paint great images? What happened after he died? Did his paintings suddenly get better? Or, did they suddenly become good for making money with?

I feel that the ”photography ghetto” thinking is a world view based on the fact that one only sees an insignificant fraction of photographs published and bases one’s world view on that. And as a world view that is as unevolved and ignorant as thinking that the world is flat, or that bird masks protects against the plague.

For every famous photographer there’s certainly a couple or perhaps even thousands that are either as good or maybe better than the famous one, it’s just that they haven’t been noticed because they lack the right contacts, do not fit the current trends, live in the wrong part of the world, are still alive or do not have the same economical resources. Does that make their images less great? Does it really? I don’t think so.

I believe the internet does just not have the possibility to broaden the way we understand photography and what makes great photography but is the key to it. It’ll take time, and it will be antagonized by the ones that uphold the current system, and that’s natural, since we are human after all, but there will be a change.

Please, do not invent new ”innovative” interfaces for showing your portfolios on the net. Interfaces are delicate things of interaction and designing them isn’t something anybody can do. You’re photographers, not interface designers.

A poor interface makes viewers concentrate on the interface – mouse, trackpad, pointer, scroll bar, button, link, whatnot – and not on your wonderful pictures. You wouldn’t do a exhibition in the physical world where moving around would laborious and piss people off, chase them out of your show and make them remember your poor design instead of the the few small images you offer them, would you? (Some of you would, of course, since that might be a statement but then it wouldn’t really be about photography anymore, would it?)

Anything that breaks your viewers concentration is bad. Very few of you have so interesting images, that the viewer, a potential buyer perhaps, feels it worthy to struggle through a torturing maze of knobs and levers to see them all. Viewers want to enjoy your photos – give them that pleasure, make it easy to access you imagery.

And all that Flash… Flash is dangerous because it feeds the irrational need of designing quirky interfaces your viewers couldn’t care less about. You have to remember, that the interface is not for you but for everybody else, and they all think differently than you.

Or maybe you think your pictures are safe from copying if you use Flash. That is, whatever anybody says, complete and utter bullshit. If you don’t want anybody to see your pictures do not publish any. If you put your photos on the web and they gain popularity people will copy them, that’s a fact – use it to your advantage and stop whining.

You want to show work, but you really don’t need fancy scrollbars or bouncing buttons to do that. Your viewers don’t need fancy scrollbars or bouncing buttons, they want to submerge themselves in your imagery. Make people notice what you excel in, not what you suck at.

Trust me on this one: It’s ok to have a simple interface without any bells and whistles. It’s your work you’re presenting, not the shoebox you keep it in.

Thank you.

Snapshots 2007: 367 photographs in chronological order from January 7th to December 31st. Doesn’t include every day of the year, but quite many though and some days are represented by several photos. Enjoy.

Here’s a small collection of links to some of my pictures.