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Apr
'26
'Thomas Hawk has a very insightful piece on his blog today, about the democratisation of photography.
I have been an avid user of Flickr from way before it became a Yahoo! property and a lot of what he says resonates with me. Much of the attractiveness of flickr lies in its features - in Explore, which uses a secret sauce to distill the finest, most interesting photographs uploaded onto flickr every day, in the comments and forums where the discussion is both constructive and informative.
But the true power of Flickr lies in its ability to showcase talent - to make masters of us all. Carmen Gonzalez, known to her fans on flickr as simply Solea receives hundreds of visitors to her photostream, many of them stopping to admire her edgy voyeuristic self-portraits in the comments. But this popularity is not restricted to the self contained world of flickrites - she has been written about in newspapers and magazines, interviewed on television and recently had her first exhibition.
Rebekka, an Icelandic blonde whose photostream is filled with conceptual artsy stuff including her perfectly executed multiplicity set, is another example of how well flickr helps good talent find its way to the top. Her photostream has been viewed over 3 million times, she has been written about in newspapers and has got herself top notch photographic assignments, including, most famously, the Prius campaign in Iceland.
Art, today is judged, not by a clique of snotty art critics, but by a community of ordinary people spread across the length and breadth of the planet. Like other mediums of expression, it has managed to shrug off the middleman.