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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
On the photo-sharing site Flickr, instant and unlikely communities spring up around a wild universe of images, from cats and grocery day to giving birth.
Dec 20, 2004 | Meet Josie Robson of Berkeley, Calif., who was born on Flickr, a photo-sharing site that's still in beta. Josie's two moms bought a camera phone before the birth of their first child so that they could get pictures to the new grandparents as quickly as possible. "We sent out an e-mail the night I went into labor that said, 'Here goes!'" says Conchita Robson. "Go to my link: flickr.com/photos/conchita."
In the delivery room, Conchita's wife, Ann, snapped photos on a camera phone and zipped them via e-mail to Conchita's Flickr page. Friends and family then spent hours hitting reload on their browsers, while virtually cheering on the laboring mom in the comments section below the emerging photos: "Yay! Baby is coming ... Hope she makes a quick entrance for you ... Hang in there Mom," reads one. Just after Josie was born on Sept. 28 at 3:45 p.m., in the space of an e-mail from that camera phone, her image hit the Web to a chorus of "!!!" and "Yay!" from her waiting admirers.
What will Josie and her peers be doing with their own camera phones -- or whatever image machines they'll be toting around -- by the time they're old enough to take digital pictures? After all, some of Josie's cohorts are already making appearances online before they're even out of the womb, judging from all the ultrasound images on Flickr.
If webcams were a voyeuristic novelty exploited by a smattering of exhibitionists to the delight of the ogling online masses, camera phones and digital cameras have reversed the equation. Now, everyone is starring in their own personal "Truman Show," sharing digital images both profound and ordinary. With every new haircut or pair of shoes that pops up on Flickr, the lines between "real" life and the mimetic are becoming ever further blurred.
Flickr is one of many photo-sharing sites, including, but not limited to, Fotolog, Fotothing, Zoto, Fotki, Smugmug and Pbase. Smugmug enjoyed a moment of fame in early December when the Navy launched an investigation into photos that surfaced on the site that apparently depicted Navy SEALs torturing Iraqi prisoners.
On most sites, you create your own album or page of photos, and invite your friends to look at them. But on Flickr, you can mingle all your photos with similar images, creating an endlessly beguiling cross-pollination of photos that spark a host of unique communities.
Flickr allows its more than 176,000 members to meet each other through both images and words in an ever-evolving visual playground. The onslaught of images that appear on the site range from the truly artistic to the bluntly documentary, a pool of more than 2.2 million photos that's growing at the rate of about 30,000 a day. What's unique is that 82 percent of the pictures on the site are publicly available to anyone who cares to look at them and riff off them. Members can keep their photos private, shared only with a specified group of intimates, but most choose not to, allowing the pictures of their cat or car to freely commingle with others.
The result is a dynamic environment, prone to all sorts of instant fads, created by members inspiring each other to go in new directions with their cameras. It makes digital photography not only instantly shareable, but immediately participatory, creating collaborative communities around everything from the secret life of toys to what grocery day looks like. The result is an only-on-the-Web conversation where text and image are intermingled in a polyglot that has all the makings of a new kind of conversation.
Since all it takes is snapping a photo and e-mailing it to the site from your camera phone, or uploading it from your digital camera, it's become easier to take and share a photo than to write an e-mail or a blog entry. Some people snap photos in the airport and upload them to the site to let friends and family know they've arrived safely in a foreign land -- the digital image replacing a phone call, e-mail or text message home.
There's a different kind of intimacy in looking at the photos a friend took today, than even in reading a missive detailing her daily routine. "It's a perfect use of the Internet. It takes less effort to look at photos than to read somebody's blog," says photographer Eliot Shepard, whose photo blog is at slower.net. "It really is visual conversation. That's the cornerstone of the appeal of the community photo site, as opposed to the individual photo blog. It's very much like speaking to each other -- making wry jokes with images but also learning about techniques, getting ideas and cross-pollination in the echo chamber."
