4th of July 1951
After a period of overuse I barely give Flickr a glance any more. The proliferation of animated gif ‘awards’ for best-super-duper-gr8est-pic-ever that get handed out to anything that is posted and the intricate descriptions of what kind of strobe lights were used to take some of the world’s most boring images just makes me want to run a mile. To use an analog analogy, I think you have to have a crate-digger of great skill and patience to find the good stuff on Flickr (Mrs Deane is among the best that I know of).
But once in a while Flickr does throw something pretty unexpected at you. The level of detail that goes into these photographs by Michael Paul Smith is pretty astounding. Models fascinate a number of contemporary photographers (Thomas Demand, Naoya Hatakeyama, Naoki Honjo) and while I don’t think Murphy is driven by the same motivations, there is something inherently fascinating about this kind of photographic ‘illusion’. Check out the full set here, complete with mustachioed ‘behind the scenes’ evidence.
4 Comments
Looking at the artist’s favorites, I came across this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/theresasthompson/3832816445/
Apparently a woman that dresses in retro clothes has photoshopped herself into some of his scenes. Another: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theresasthompson/3669986699/
Great example of why the internet is wonderful…
You do realize that complaining that your photos get too many awards on flickr is a little like complaining how awful it is to be too rich or too thin?
I wasn’t complaining about my photos getting too many awards on Flickr. Whatever photos I have on there are not really in that space. My point is that Flickr is overrun with people presenting each other with ‘home-made’ awards for their pictures. Flickr is interesting as an online tool as it should allow for a conversation around photographs, but somehow that conversation is almost exclusively limited to people giving each other the verbal equivalent of a thumb’s up.
You can find some interesting work on flickr depending on what you like of course :
http://www.flickr.com/photos/stopped_time3/show/