Flickr, She Photographers, Self-Portraits and the Warm Fuzzies of the Critique

Flickr, love it, greatest asset to amateur photography ever invented since the 35mm camera. But like all communities there are pros and cons. The pros are the pros as the awesome photographers that actually evolve the art despite not being recognised as a professional photographer. These guys should be in magazines like Nature’s Best or B&W or American Photo and the like. They deserve recognition and awards. Other pros are the amateurs who really try and work hard at this passion of theirs and try very hard to work everyday to take better photographs and craft themselves into better photographers and you can see their evolution in their stream. This is what makes Flickr all worth it.

Then there are the cons and unfortunately many of them get a lot of attention for their prurient nature, because the photographer is a girl, young, looks good and of course most of her fans are male or other female photographers with the same affliction. And each posting is a feeding frenzy of comments on sexiness and beauty and promises of roses and romances. Their egos must inflate two-fold with each and every comment. And all those lecherous men keep hoping for a peek at nipple poking through a shirt, the crest of heaving bosom, the promise of more skin, basically, free soft-core amateur porn.

Now I’m no prude, I love nude photography actually and would love to find a great model to create wonderful images myself and there are amazing self-portrait artists on Flickr which I admire and continue to push the boundaries. But there’s a huge difference between someone doing art work and adulation starved young girls. And they are pretty easy to pinpoint. Just write a comment that doesn’t flatter the ego.

The artist will take the critique and analyse it and handle it. The artist might answer back; explain the reasoning behind the image. That’s if you give a frank and real criticism, which excludes comments like “Nice nipples”. The Attention-starved self-portrait artist will delete your comments. Which is what happened today to me today.

I visited a Flickr stream I visit when updated and the photographer has more or less 300 pictures in her stream and one third of them are self portraits. She’s pretty, has those killer blue eyes, infectious smile so all the boys are clamouring for her and I bet she eats it up like a junky on crack. Seriously who wouldn’t? But all her self-portraits are relatively the same. Three-quarters profile of the left side of her face with her eyes looking far-left. The images are not bad, but after a hundred or so it becomes repetitious and a little boring.

So today I decided to ask a question.

“Not to be a dick, but do you have a right side to your face?”

Yes I know a little blunt, but it’s me here, not some mamby pamby fan only willing to give her my devotion. And my comment was deleted. Its all fine with me. In the end I don’t really care, but it speaks to something.

There are a lot of streams on Flickr that exist simply for girls to expose themselves (not necessarily in a sexual way, many of these stream are very innocent but the results are the same) and gather a lot of comments just because they are pretty, certainly not because they have a good eye for framing. How well can you frame when you are holding the camera pointed at yourself?

But these narcissistic praise-hounds annoy me because they completely Hoover all the statistics and traffic for no reason other reason than being pretty and being able to operate a camera. Just like some of the top blogs in my area who participate in a blog ranking service, the same issue appears. One of the often #1 blog is this blogger who has nothing to say, her blogs are often 2 or 3 lines at most and always circumambulate around her boring barren sex life and is always accompanied with a stock photo from the same stock photo supplier. She has nothing to say but yet people come to her blog by the thousands in a small French market in North America. Why, why could that be? Could it be because of her verbosity or because she has huge knockers and constantly talks about sex?

This is what disappoints me. The High School paradigm never ceases, it keeps living and growing like a viral disease that is untreatable despite all claims of anti-philistinism. Regardless of maturity, tits make asses of us all. Girls use them as assets to win the oblivious popularity contest and boys can’t help but be drawn to them like moths to the flame.

There’s not enough porn, cheesecake and naked girls on the web, we have to flock to Flickr to get just that one extra picture of seductive titillation.