Why Flickr is Awesome

This posting should be read in the context of the previous posting.

First, flickr is awesome just because it is a community of people who are trying. Trying is better than not trying. Occasionally, some genuinely good work appears. It's a bit thin on the ground, but it's out there. Spend an hour surfing, and you'll probably find a dozen decent images, and maybe one genuinely excellent one.

Secondly, and this might be more important, that horrible echo chamber of ego-barter and over-processed eye-candy might just be creating one or more new aesthetics. Anything is better than the current state of photography as art. Galleries full of crappy photographs of malls, or more or less identical photographs of nothing, all bolstered by an incomprehensible artist's statement about capturing the zeitgeist of the popular wubble wubble blat blat zzzzzzzzz. Ugh.

It's possible that pictures of mountains under black skies filled with puffy sepia clouds, bolstered by 12,529 comments all reading "Great Capture!" is a step up.

I'm not sure that flickr's helping build a new and worthwhile aesthetic. It's possible. I am almost certain that if such new aesthetics do arise, I will not recognize them until well after the fact. Nonetheless, I wish these folks well.

Go, budding photographers, go!