Figuring Out Flickr

I've recently discovered Flickr, the photo hosting site. I've known about it for a long time but I never gave it a full look-through.

A few years ago, I seem to remember Life magazine doing a special edition where photographers documented a single day of the entire world. With Flickr, you can click on an icon showing you a sample of the five to six thousand photos uploaded every minute to their site. It's worth looking at to see just what people find interesting enough in their lives to a) document with a camera, and b) upload for the whole world to see.

It's an odd mix. I was surprised to find fewer wedding and travel photos, or even ones of new babies,than I expected, though they do appear in large numbers. Then there's the photos by "serious" photographers who have not only spent a great deal of time on composition and exposure, but on tweaking the image in Photoshop or some other image-altering program to create brilliant, if slightly unreal, if not surreal, pictures.

Party photos, particularly right now at Halloween, are big, though they usually consist of overexposed, slightly out of focus shots taken at odd angles -- probably representative of the physical and mental condition of both the photographer and subjects. I think Flickr censors out some photos to keep the "girls gone wild" element to a minimum.

Then there's the fashionistas/wannabe models, who shoot hundreds of pictures of themselves, taken at every conceivable angle, wearing their latest outfits, hairstyles, and makeup. These women scare the hell out of me for some reason.

Remember when little girls played with dolls? Now big girls play with dolls and document their designer efforts on Flickr. This phenomenon seems to be an Asian thing, not too far removed from Anime. I don't get it. But then, I don't really get Anime, either.

On very rare occasion, you'll find photos that were taken decades ago. The best stream I've found so far were several dozen photos taken on the streets of DC during the 1972 Presidential inauguration parade. If you think the world is fucked up now, look at these: Midwestern marching bands and floats right out of the 1950's; Nixon with his famous phony smile waving to the crowd; a large and haggard bunch of radical college students protesting the war. All images I've never seen, and worthy of a national archive.