The Weekly Flickr Video Series

A "face" by SteffenKahl from the "faces in places" project and book

Here's something for those interested in the "curation" of digital images in the new era—that is, conceptualizing, editing, and redacting pictures into coherent and fully realized bodies of work. The traditional methods—one person making all the photographs, one or more people selecting and sequencing them—may be on the decline. But as digital images proliferate, eventually the manner in which pictures are pulled together into projects is going to become ever more essential.

Here's an interesting set of examples—the Weekly Flickr Video Series. You can delve at your own leisure and according to your own choice. The ones I've watched so far have been well done and interesting, both for the images themselves and as documents of how people come up with projects. I first looked at the "faces in places" project, which formalizes a motif that photographers have long played with, namely, that humans are predisposed to see faces. The group's only rule is, "it has to be a naturally occurring face."

Londoner Jody Smith says that when he started the Flickr group, "I soon discovered that other people were a lot better at it than me"—and the group as a whole was better than any one individual photographer. If that's a harbinger of the way photographers will work in the future, it would emphasize rather than diminish the importance of conceptualizing and editing.

There's a book, the profits from which all go to a children's charity.

That's just one of many projects in the series. You can pick a different one that you think might have more appeal to you. Check out a video or two in the series if you get a chance...you might find some inspiration.

Mike
(Thanks to J. Brad Goodwin)

Original contents copyright 2016 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Terry Burnes: "It's interesting how often the Faces feature in Apple's Photos application identifies some inanimate object as a face. Perhaps it is curating an exhibit."

Comments

[Herman]

Hi Fidelity-

[Michael Perini]

We are living in the age of 'Big Data' and A.I., we have crowd funding and open source. We have Bots and Crawlers, some of them creepy some of them not.
Like all new stuff these things cut both ways they can inspire us, and they can humble us which are both good in prpoer measure, but they can imply the the idiosyncratic human touch is unnecessary, or that so much is out there we have little to contribute. It can lead us to be complacent when we see group think, or accepting when companies tell us what we should like.

On balance though the trend is empowering and the issues come because we haven't yet mastered the new technology .
But participation is key. If we see something we have to say something , and we've never had more ability to have our voices heard or pictures seen.

[Dan Khong]

Mike

Hahaha....that nose looks like Darth Vader's.

Them eyes appear a tad Oriental.

Dan

[Kenneth Tanaka]

Recognizing embedded shapes and forms - faces, letters, numbers - is an outstanding visual exercise for children...and adults...to develop more acute cognitive skills. Today's camera-in-every-hand culture makes the exercise easy to implement. Try it yourself for a few days.

As a book? Mmmm...I dunno.

@Herman: Love that image!