Dressed In Value is a graphic design studio in Louisville, Kentucky.

Monday, November 10, 2008

This is about pho­tog­ra­phers and their using Flickr, and some­thing to per­haps counter my recent neg­a­tiv­ity toward the social web.

I have wit­nessed some pho­tog­ra­phers avoid using Flickr because they were afraid that some­one might steal their images. They were too caught up in the idea of need­ing to pro­tect their work from misuse. They held fast to an idea that some­one out there wanted to cheat them of some­thing that is owed them or is right­fully theirs. They chose instead to show only a few of their works hidden behind a low res­o­lu­tion Flash slideshow, trying their best to con­trol the view­ing con­text and envi­ron­ment with just the right music play­ing in the back­ground. And of these same who reluc­tantly used Flickr anyway, they chose to limit the view­ing of their images to small resolutions. 

This is a huge mis­take. Some of the best and most suc­cess­ful (suc­cess­ful in terms of wide recog­ni­tion) pho­tog­ra­phers that I have witnessed in our present Age of Flickr are the ones who put their images on there and allow high res­o­lu­tion view­ing with­out water­marks and copy­rights burned directly on the image. They give all they have to their view­ers. They trust people. They trust them to see the image in under­stand­ing or mis­un­der­stand­ing, plea­sure or dis­plea­sure, clar­ity or fog, with ques­tions or dis­putes — and trust that the assigned use-allowances (copyrights) will be respected. 

Why do some pho­tog­ra­phers avoid show­ing the fullest qual­ity of work if their hope is in gain­ing new clients or spread­ing the mes­sage of their work? In set­ting lim­i­ta­tions in view­ing, it seems to me that it might be less about pro­tect­ing the work than it is about self-​image and self-​importance, which does noth­ing to advance the work.

It’s frus­trat­ing and highly dis­sat­is­fy­ing to come across a beau­ti­ful pho­to­graph and not be able to see its finer details in a higher res­o­lu­tion, or not be able to book­mark the image to come back to it or send it to some­one in email. (I’ve come across one fine exam­ple of a Flash inter­face with indi­vid­ual URLs for each photo.) We will and do become more aware of the issue of res­o­lu­tion as our com­puter screens become increas­ingly larger and more dense.

From my per­spec­tive and expe­ri­ence, pho­tog­ra­phy as com­merce, fine art, or plea­sure is noth­ing if not shared. If indeed shar­ing the work is imper­a­tive to ful­fill the pur­pose of the work, it doesn’t make sense to me that a pho­tog­ra­pher would choose to pub­lish a crip­pled view­ing experience.

I real­ize this may sound crazy to even be talk­ing about this, for who isn’t on Flickr? Who doesn’t share their work in high-​resolution? There are cer­tainly plenty of exam­ples that don’t fit my both­ers. Nonethe­less, I’ve come across plenty of real life folks and others I only know of through an online port­fo­lio who seem to fear let­ting loose the secret family recipe.

A good rule of thumb, I’d say, is if you don’t want people to have it, don’t put it online.