The WELL: inkwell.vue.272: fotolog.book and the fotolog phenomenon

#72: Gail Williams (gail) Wed 17 May 06 13:05

Wed, 17 May 2006 13:05:00 PDT

Thanks for coming by! I was pleased to see mentions of the conversation elsewhere around the net, too. Nice job everybody! [Read entire topic]

#71: Cynthia Dyer-Bennet (cdb) Wed 17 May 06 12:36

Wed, 17 May 2006 12:36:00 PDT

Johanna, Adam, Andrew, et al -- this has been a great conversation! These past two weeks have gone by so fast, and I want to thank all of you for joining us. It's been a real pleasure.

Though our virtual spotlight has turned to a new discussion, this topic will remain open for further comments. I understand that you have busy lives, and I realize you may not be able to stick around indefinitely, but please know that you're welcome to stay and talk some more if you can.

I have one small question I'd like to throw out here, just in case one of you has time to respond:

Are you considering doing another book with the same focus? Is there a possibility of having a series of books -- Best of fotolog, 2006; Best of fotolog, 2007 -- I'd think there would still be so much material to publish, and a seemingly endless stream of new material added to the pile.

I hope so; anyway. Good luck, and best wishes! [Read entire topic]

#70: Johanna Neurath (johannaneurath) Tue 16 May 06 15:21

Tue, 16 May 2006 15:21:00 PDT

Yes, yes, the death of 'something' is always being predicted when new media emerge... Video would ruin cinema attendance, e-books would kill paper books etc, etc, and as you say doesn't really work that way... the old media get shaken up a little and have to re-evaluate what they are doing...

And Thames & Hudson publish some popular culture (street art, street fashion. music graphics and so on), but it is an area that I see growing for us... [Read entire topic]

#69: virtual community or butter? (bumbaugh) Mon 15 May 06 12:35

Mon, 15 May 2006 12:35:00 PDT

And, to add to Gail's print-oriented questions, what's next for fotolog? What's planned (that can be revealed without having to kill us or buy our silence)?

Users, here: What would you like to see develop on fotolog? [Read entire topic]

#68: Gail Williams (gail) Mon 15 May 06 11:04

Mon, 15 May 2006 11:04:00 PDT

I confess, have an extreme, obsessed user-point-of-view agenda for What Should Fotolog Do and What Should Flickr Do in order to each be better but not identical to one another. (But I'm deeply sympathetic because working at The WELL has made me painfully sensitive to technical, social and financial hurdles in development and innovation. Just keeping going is a real accomplishment. Spawning a beautiful book is rarity for any site of any kind!)

Some kind of fave gallery on fotolog and some kind of friends-of-friends gallery-like mobility on flickr have been such an obsession of some of us that I even set up a blog specifically to work out my obsessive issues in those areas. http://gailwilliams.wordpress.com/ (Just in the spirit of full disclosure. But that's mere topic-drift here.)

Johanna, the article about the ubiquity of images is interesting. Fifteen years ago I was arguing with people here that having all this text-based talking and chatter was the death of writing. But it just isn't.

I imagine that the monks who copied manuscripts in the middle ages may have found the idea of universal literacy horrifying, why, it could lead to just anybody making a permanent record of just anything! Yet important writing is rare and valued. For example, not many written diaries are historic gems. More literacy doesn't kill beloved writing, it makes some but not unlimited competition for well-written books and articles, but it sure does make more filtering desirable! Perhaps Visual Librarian is a job title of the furture.

But of course the focus of your book is on populism... even though some of the people you selected have training in photography or visual arts, when they are at fotolog they are doing something new and different. It's usually very casual, and sometimes it is quite a bit like braided visual diaries. And that explains the "yearbook" context for the fotolog.book, one of many ways it can be experienced.

How is this book performing in the context of your catalogue, Johanna? Your press seems to do mostly fine art, design and antiquities. Did this push a boundary, and if so, is it a promising direction for your company? [Read entire topic]

#67: kayili! (kayo) Sun 14 May 06 08:14

Sun, 14 May 2006 08:14:00 PDT

Interesting... I was just thinking as I looked at some favorites on flickr (I WISH YOU WERE LISTENING FOTOLOG PEOPLE) that I wished I could make sets out of my favorites... [Read entire topic]

#66: Johanna Neurath (johannaneurath) Sun 14 May 06 03:42

Sun, 14 May 2006 03:42:00 PDT

And to jump back up to kayo's question (back up there at comment 53). "Did you start with one favorite and try to find others that connected to it in a certain way?"

We shuffled everything into sections first and then printed out colour contact sheets of thumbnail images... which we scribbled all over... trying to find connections between images... Most spreads in one section will have SOME sort of theme however tenuous that connects all the images on that double page - even if it's totally opaque to anyone but me, Andrew or Karolina the designer!

And sort of relatedly to the above, recently, someone sent me a link to this article:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/printpage/0,5942,18925277,00.html

after I read the article I thought how sad - but also how true - and that now that everything is so available (& in such abundance!) the people who get on and the people who are successful are the people who are good EDITORS, whether that's the photographer or artist themselves or someone trying to make sense of it all...

For me an important part of Flickr or Fotolog is that each of us is an editor as well as publisher...

And we are editing both our own images AND other peoples - we choose who we look at, we choose who's Fotolog to jump to next, and we all make our own patterns out of the images we see... Unlike in a newspaper or on TV or indeed a book (even fotolog.book) where someone else has pre-edited the images for us... [Read entire topic]

#65: Johanna Neurath (johannaneurath) Sun 14 May 06 03:22

Sun, 14 May 2006 03:22:00 PDT

Hehehe Gail can totally relate to your last comment...! Have done very similar things myself...

And I guess sort of related to davadams comment, but I notice that when I am really plugged into Fotolog or Flickr my sense of time changes...

Two or three days seems an eternity if one of my friends or favourites hasn't uploaded any new pictures.... And I am far more aware of the seasons and nature - wonderful if you live in the centre of a big city like I do... [Read entire topic]

#64: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 13 May 06 14:31

Sat, 13 May 2006 14:31:00 PDT

Fotolog, Flickr and even putting photos up on blogs add two things that are at the heart of the social dynamic of all of this. One is the possibolity to be found by strangers (or friends of friends), the virtual gallery dynamic. The other is the ability to respond in written words or other images. Those two things make something awfully powerful.

They lead to learning, for one thing.

I had studied photography seriously in my teens and early twenties, but even though I loved museums and art and photo books, I had no faith in my sense of composition. Within a week of being on fotolog I was learning what kinds of composition make me go "wow" because when I uploaded I would see other images in thumbnail format next to mine, and I'd think "better composition!" far too often.

At some point I saw a glorious photo thumbnail that truned out to be an image of a shower curtain with a caption that it was nearly midnight and the photographer had just managed to squeeze this shot in and kept her vow of an image she liked every day.

I decided to do that, and I kept it up for the most part for almost a year. I learned more than in any class I ever took, from being "on assignment" for one group or another, or having a specific person's living, changing, unfolding work in my mind.

Some of the groups that evolved at fotolog were literally games -- like the sequential numbers group. I rushed out one afternoon to find a particular number -- and have it also be a photo that please me -- because the group had gotten stuck. That's a silly but concrete example of how socializing and improvisation unfold in a visual space. [Read entire topic]

#63: Gail Williams (gail) Sat 13 May 06 14:10

Sat, 13 May 2006 14:10:00 PDT

I agree -- that's a profound way in which it's different. And that extends even to "chimping" where you display and share and discuss in person while looking at the photo. [Read entire topic]