If one thing doesn't matter, does anything?

[imomus]

For a while I've been meaning to revive my Flickr page, because at the moment one particular person's Flickr page is just about the only thing that really excites me on the internet. Annoyingly for you -- sorry! -- I'm not going to say whose page it is. Unspoiled Beach Syndrome! But I will tell you that my favourite syndrome this week is Euphemism Treadmill Syndrome, and link to that.

I feel like I still haven't got my Flickr page right. I keep wanting to start again from zero and just upload truly magnificent pictures. Somehow, when I do grids of pictures for Click Opera, it works. The juxtapositions and thematic groupings make something aesthetically pleasing. The Flickr page, like most photo-hosting web pages, is not pleasant to look at. The slide show is too low-res, the descriptions make words too prominent, the comments make it seem like a country fair with each "pumpkin" being judged (especially my bulgy tight trousers, sigh). I also feel like the photos are dull when I'm not in them (low ratings, according to Flickr's view stats) but narcissistic when I am. And my page doesn't inspire me the way my friend's page -- the one I love right now -- does. I think only flow -- a big influx of new photos each day -- could possibly save this Flickr page from neglect.

Could it be that my anxiety is all wrapped up with the nature of image-making itself? It's to do with the idea that you can only photograph one thing at a time, and with Wolfgang Tillmans' idea that "if one thing matters, everything matters". A good photo should feel like it's part of a photographic flow, and yet it should also feel exemplary. The subject matter is something real and random, and yet it has to stand for something bigger than itself. Each photograph has to be a metonym. If it's only showing the banality of what was in front of you at any given moment, it fails, unless it's part of some flow, some massive plethora, some kind of indiscriminate cinema, like Erkki Kurenniemi's pathetic attempts to commemorate everything in his life in Mika Tanilla's film Future is not what it used to be.

I think what I love with photos is the moment when I'm just beginning to twig what someone's style is about, what their eye is seeing. That happened, for me, with Wolfgang Tillmans in 1996. I still remember what it felt like to "get" what his pictures were about. Then it happened again with Gursky in about 2000. And it happens, in smaller ways, with amateur image-makers on photo-sharing sites. They've got to have a unifying style for everything to click. I don't see that on my own page, although maybe others do. Sometimes I think I need to make my Flickr page strictly conceptual. Just upload one picture a day of what I'm wearing or something.

Anyway, on the subject of photo websites, and following on from my entry on the hiddenness of the online Japanese face, I've been casting around for the sites Japanese people are using to host the trillions of photographs they take annually. So far I've come up with Fotologue, Picasa and Photozou. But -- especially in this time of cherry blossom -- the pictures on there are incredibly generic. Well, if one picture of cherry blossom matters, they all do, I suppose.

Comments

image hosts

[zzberlin.livejournal.com]

I bought a paid flickr account about a year ago, but stopped using it because there was something I didn't like about it, that I can't remember now

I use google's picasa for my public images, but what I don't like about picasa is they don't let you right click, view image, and copy the image link. The only way you can direct link to an image in a picasa album is with the image embedded in the picasa page, if that makes sense. You can't url the image itself when it is housed in picasa. Which really pisses me off. Wish I had realized that before I spent so much time putting my images up there. But I like the way picasa looks, and arranging/playing with sets of images there is really easy. In fact, picasa on the web is a better interface for managing images than iPhoto, for me (though of course with iPhoto you're not just managing your images, you can edit them too)

I really like this image:

Re: image hosts

[imomus.livejournal.com]

What drives me mad is when image hosts decide to resize your images. I use Photobucket for Click Opera images, and it recently got better (progress bar for image uploading, etc) but one thing that infuriates me is that over a certain size, I think it's 250k, the images are scaled down. I use a 550 pixel width column in Click Opera, and PhotoBucket resizes the longer images down to about 350 pixels, which is completely useless. I then have to host the image somewhere else.

Re: image hosts

[reflejos.livejournal.com]

Somethin happens lately with your blog, the images don't appear (most of them). I dont know if it is problem of my internet service. For example, your canvas, from months ago I cannot see it.

Re: image hosts

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Really? No-one else has mentioned that, and the images get lots of comments, so they seem to be there. What country are you in?