(photograph found on Flickr)
© Grady O’Connor

Sometime back in January, I wrote about Stephen Shore and linked to the audio interview where he was quoted as saying (note the bold portion):

There has to be on the web a treasure trove of brilliant untutored pictures. I’d seen the photographs that were made at the time of the London Underground bombing by people with cell phones in the Underground cars. And they have an energy to them, and an immediacy, that was pretty extraordinary. They weren’t structurally fine pictures, but, you know, this is a new world. This is people in a subway car that has just been bombed - they flip out their phones and start taking pictures. This is pretty amazing. So I thought, okay, I’m going to find a lot of great stuff and I went onto Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit. I couldn’t believe it. It is just all conventional. It’s all clichés. It is one visual convention after another. Just this week a friend of mine sent me some pictures he’s been collecting on eBay. And they were fabulous. It is just stuff for sale. The difference is that on eBay the people are not trying to make art. They are just trying to show something. ‘This is what this bottle looked like. It is not silhouetted. I’m not going to do it at sunset. I’m just going to take a picture.’ That is the motive of most photographers – ‘This is something I find interesting in the world and I’m going to make it clear.’

Alec decided to bring this back into conversation on his blog - following it up by asking simply, where are the great pictures on Flickr?

Among the 207 responses (and counting) to his question, I thought it’d be likely that mine would get lost there - or I’d get lost making it.

But, oh! The benefits of having a blog!

Rather than write a wordy response to the question where I examine Flickr as a platform for images and how this relates to what is or is not to be considered “fine art,” I’m going to resort to the less analytical answer (where I do a little of this but not nearly as much as I would if I weren’t stopping myself short):

Yes, Flickr is full of shit. I was recently at a swanky contemporary art fair and that was too. Venue aside, it’s really just a fact that all the greatest work is generally found hiding amongst everything that’s not; how could a single piece of art be particularly moving or especially nice to look at if all art was?

Flickr, viewed from afar, is a decent representation of the array of image making that’s happening at the moment where in fact most “photographers” are not attempting to make fine art photographs but often have other motivations. Or, in the case of Shore’s criticism, those who are attempting to make artful images are tying too hard — “one visual convention after another.”

It can be rather tragic to witness any previously tangible practice go digital (as Flickr is, for many, a replacement to a dusty photo album) and perhaps this is part of Shore’s frustration? But, that wouldn’t make much sense considering the recent series of books that Shore has come out with which were, as he described it, “produced with print-on-demand technology and made with Apple’s iPhoto application.” Interestingly, Flickr users can easily turn their uploaded images into a Blurb books.

Realistically, though, the spectrum of photographs made and represented on Flickr is not far from the spectrum that’s not. Think about it. Though his comment is mostly true, it’s upsetting to hear Shore dismiss much of the potential for great photographs and, inherently, the excellent photographers that use the website to share their images, many of which do so because they have no web design knowledge and/or it happens to be more functional than other free image-sharing sites.

So, for Shore - and to respond to Alec’s question more literally - here are some of my Flickr Favorites.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 9th, 2007 at 1:23 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.