Flickr Sux
www.flickr.com
After winding down this hyper-geeky and über-uncool (yet embarrassingly satisfying) “Month of Photography” that crested with Photolucida and the Society for Photographic Education national conference, I thought it was time to flee the images of the trained and calculated photographers for something fresher and more immediate.
I was somewhat familiar with Flickr.com–the boomingly popular photo-sharing web phenomenon–and thought that a look at its mammoth repository of catalogued, amateur photographs would be an appropriate way to end the month. After spending some time going through a fraction of the 5.5 million photographs on the database, I came to one conclusion–Flickr Sux!
One of the main objectives of the young website is “to make the process of organizing photos collaborative.” Members (who can register for free) post their snapshots–an ungodly number of which come from camera phones–online into virtual albums that are open to the public. The magic of Flickr lies in the “tag”; each image is categorized by subject matter, and viewers can also browse by topics both mundane and arcane. Girls Eating Sandwiches is a humorous album started locally, but a glance at the other 100 most popular albums yields stiflingly lame results: baby, 2004, flowers, party, people.
To use a more popular metaphor, I think not of the general suckiness of TV award shows, but of one whose appeal I can’t begin to fathom–the People’s Choice Awards. Call me an elitist, or at least an anti-populist, but majority consensus always favors the least daring, middle-of-the-road option. I’d prefer to see (in theory, anyway), the Critic’s Choice Awards (for obvious reasons), and after that the Oscars, where honors are bestowed from a peer community. When everybody participates, mediocrity spreads like a virus.
There are some marginally interesting tags and photos on Flickr, and somebody could conceivably curate a charming show of amateur photographs from the site. But that very idea is completely un-Flickr. Flickr dictates that everyone get the same amount of playing time, that no images are more worthy of viewing than others. Glimmers of brilliance are lost in a sea of mediocrity. Learning to Love You More succeeds because it attracts creative people; Found Magazine succeeds because it carefully chooses its selections; the best blogs about photography succeed because they highlight interesting work. And Flickr succeeds because… everybody gets to participate? The only things flickering here are my eyelids as I slip into deep REM sleep.