Flickr was originally an offshoot of an online video game, but ended up becoming more successful than the game and stayed online after the game disappeared. The emphasis was on photo sharing and communities. I posted my first photo on Flickr in 2004. Early photos I remember as being a mixed bag, not all of great quality. Snapshots. The quality of many people’s photographs seemed to improve over the course of the next few years – showing their pictures to people, the approval of a small community of virtual friends, some coaching, aspiring to be as good as some of the better known photographers on the site, sharing details of equipment and techniques – the standard of many images on Flickr picked up.

Cut to now. There are still snapshots. There are still duffers, family portraits and holiday snaps, but Flickr has been overrun. It has become a madhouse of over-saturated, nastily-framed, pretentiously-titled, watermark-plastered poster art. Most of the popular photos on Flickr would be more at home on the front of a Hallmark card or a poster in a teenager’s bedroom. The site is choking with the sheer, desperate effort of so many tens of thousands of people busily expressing themselves. A self-portrait every day for a year (even the boring ones), the three millionth sunset, and increasingly, weird artwork that would look right at home on a Japanese pencil case. Flickr should re-brand as a stock photography site for funeral home brochures.

How to continue polluting Flickr with nasty, pretentious tack:

1. Take photo.
2. Put on computer.
3. Open in Photoshop, bump up saturation by a factor of one million, and maybe draw on a horrific frame.
4. Add a watermark right across the photo just to make abundantly sure that everyone knows this monstrosity is yours.
5. Upload to Flickr.
6. Give the photo a title that sounds as close as possible to the name of a movie normally played on Living TV.
7. Submit to at least fifteen different and equally pointless groups with obscure rules such as “Submit three photos, comment on one, make an omelette and include the phrase ‘endless love’”.
8. Watch the comments roll in, even better if all of the comments are accompanied by blinking animated GIFS with titles like “The BEST nonsensical twaddle”.

Some of Flickr’s recent loony bin specials, as amusing for the titles as anything:

Heal The World – Michael Jackson

Escher meets MJ. Terrifying.

secret love

Passion and martial arts.

fetus

Autoerotic asphyxiation or an early Ripley clone?

Colours of Life………….

…or just some colours and a bloody annoying title.

WITH DEEP GRATITUDE and LOVE!

I’m so grateful I offer you this nastily-framed, dodgily coloured flower. Thanks a bunch.

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