www.fotokritik.de
Texte zur zeitgenössischen Fotografie und digitalen Bildkunst
Weblogs turn out to be quite useful instruments for political activists, bloggers turn into citizen journalists, and artists explore the internet for their own purposes. All of them store their images on sites like Flickr. Photographs of newsworthy events appear on these sites sooner than on TV. Storing one's photos there is, however, not just switching to a new mode of delivery. The creative use of such services subverts the fundamental assumptions of gathering and presenting information. Content is no longer being transmitted from A to B following the well-established pattern of publishing; instead it is developed continuously in an ongoing mutual feedback process. People re-discover the idea that a network of many small and self-determined voices may be more useful than any corporate or institutional medium that is simply meant to be consumed. Today's technique is much more suitable for such approaches than any previous technique.
One of the best ways to observe the collective production of meaning is the system of indexing and classifying photographs. In a traditional picture library photographs are classified by subject. An archive is made accessible by applying a limited number of keywords following a strictly determined system of classification. Somebody looking for an image will only find it through these keywords - or by mere coincidence. It is significant that no such overarching and predetermined system exists in user-generated online pools. On the contrary, everybody is entitled to invent new categories, everybody applies the keywords they consider appropriate, and people do this not only for their own photographs, they do it for virtually everybody's photographs. Thus the manifold readings and associations evoked by the complexity of a photographic image are preserved in its description in a much more efficient way — and it becomes much more likely that somebody looking for any type of picture will actually find and eventually use it, no matter what it is, a trivial picture taken for utilitarian purposes or a piece of supposed photo art.
23.08.2008
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