Flickr has been been a great inspiration for me over the last year and a half- the time I’ve been photographing consistently. I have a venue to show my work, getting it in front of dozens of viewers daily- more than I would if I had a gallery, more perhaps than if my work were in a museum. Of course I’m giving the views away for free and am not selling the work, but then the purpose of the art is to help myself and others see the world more acutely, not to supplement my income. If I weren’t a highly paid professional, my attitude and thus my approach might be different.
I certainly am insulated from the art world as a Flickr exhibitor. My feedback is not sales or critical assessment but rather image views. Early on I realized that for some reason my images attract many more views than comments, but I hope that’s because they’re a notch more visually challenging that the average image. My subjects, as here, are generally unimportant.
The New York Times Magazine has an article on the elements of the Flickr style: “While pretty and even cute, these images are also often surreal and prurient, evoking the unsettling paintings of de Chirico and Balthus, in which individual parts are beautiful and formally rendered, but something is not quite right over all. “
I agree that we often don’t get it “right over all”. And I think the phrase “forcibly manipulated” captures well what is not quite right. As digital cameras have reached maturity in the last few years, the digital darkroom is being explored vigorously. Some of the efforts are pleasing, but are fantastic and for me, ultimately unrewarding. But there’s a middle ground where the darkroom effects illuminate vision rather than obscure it.
Last year I wasn’t quite satisfied with my high contrast, saturated renderings of the suburban landscape. This year, with better set of tools and more sensitivity to the rules of the visual world, I’m happier with where I’m working in that zone between the real, banal visual world and the elevated language we can achieve in art.