本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛April 27, 2008
The Medium
Sepia No More
By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN
Let’s face facts: the Web, after nearly 20 years, has failed to uncover new masters of noble art forms like poetry, sculpture and the airport thriller. But it has engendered — for good or ill — new forms of creative expression. Blogs and viral videos are only the most obvious. Fan fiction, wikis, Flash animation and Second Life avatars are a few more. People don’t upload to the Web words and images they had fashioned apart from the Web; they fashion their stuff specifically for online platforms and audiences.

Consider photography. As art-school photographers continue to shoot on film, embrace chiaroscuro and resist prettiness, a competing style of picture has been steadily refined online: the Flickr photograph. Flickr, the wildly popular photo-sharing site, was founded by the Canadian company Ludicorp in 2004. Four years later, amid the more than two billion images that currently circulate on the site, the most distinctive offerings, admired by the site’s members and talent scouts alike, are digital images that “pop” with the signature tulip colors of Canon digital cameras.

While pretty and even cute, these images are also often surreal and prurient, evoking the unsettling paintings of de Chirico and Balthus, in which individual parts are beautiful and formally rendered, but something is not quite right over all. Flickr’s creamy fantasy pictures, many of them “erotic” (rather than sexy) portraits that have been forcibly manipulated with digital tricks, stand in contrast to the rawer and grainier 35-millimeter photography that’s still canonized by august institutions like the International Center of Photography.

Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, one of Flickr’s most popular photographers, is the leading exponent of the site’s style. An art student from Iceland who turned to social networking to acquire commissions for her drawings, she came to photography relatively late. Tellingly, she learned to work Flickr before she became proficient with a camera. She discovered how to create the minicollections called “photostreams”; how to create images that would look good shrunk, in “thumbnail” form; and how to flirt with the site’s visitors in the comments area to keep them coming back. As perhaps is always the case with artists, Guoleifsdottir’s evolution as a photographer was bound up in the evolution of her modus operandi, a way of navigating the institutions and social systems that might gain her a following and a living.

Guoleifsdottir’s Flickr opus, and her notes on the site about it, supply a portrait of the artist. In 2005, she uploaded simple snapshots of some of her drawings to the site, mostly portraits of children. Some are cool with a storybook quaintness; others look like vanity speed portraits done at a street fair. The most striking is a pastel of Guoleifsdottir’s nephew, apparently a rendering of a single-source flash snapshot, in which the boy’s wholesome face appears stung with bright light and his tightly-constricted pupils are tinted with the red that some camera flashes impart.

Because Flickr is a site for photography, commenters tend to go easy on photos of paintings or drawings, which they don’t pretend to have expertise in. As a result, the minimal commentary on Guoleifsdottir’s early drawings was very forgiving — and even naïve. About the image of a young boy, one commenter gushed, “This is fabulous work, how long does it take you to do one of these?”

On the heels of this encouragement, Guoleifsdottir turned to photography in earnest. The first photos Guoleifsdottir posted to Flickr were shot with an analog camera: snapshots of her school-age sons and a portrait or two of herself. Commenters loved the way Guoleifsdottir looked — she’s a weight-trained, protean-looking woman with movie-star eyes — but Flickr members often deem analog photos unfocused. (“A mixture of melancholy and curiosity,” wrote a commenter on one image. “It’s a shame about the focus.”)

Guoleifsdottir shifted to a digital camera, first using a Canon Digital Ixus, and then a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT, one of the most popular cameras on Flickr. (Discussions of cameras, lenses and film pervade the site.) When she started uploading digital pictures, like her stony self-portrait “torso,” her photos starting breaking Flickr records for numbers of views, and comments turned to catcalls (“gosh . . . huge breasts,” someone noted astutely).

Guoleifsdottir learned how to title and tag photos so that they might readily come up in searches; how to police copyright transgressions (as when some of her photos were sold illegally on eBay); and how to push, push contrasts by processing her pictures with Photoshop software. These skills might not have advanced her with New York galleries, but they made for a charmed ride on Flickr. A photography blogger who posts under the name Thomas Hawk is a Flickr regular, and he told me in an e-mail conversation that there is not a single Flickr style. But he conceded that intense postproduction processing is necessary for popularity on the site.

Guoleifsdottir’s next step was to abandon realism. A few experiments in 10-second exposures led her to juvenile representations of specters and phantoms, which nonetheless drew praise. Playing with shutter speed, she caught an image of liquor splashing out of a glass; Flickr named it the most-interesting photo of the day on July 29, 2005. She started intensely manipulating and coloring her photos in postproduction, creating haunted interiors, doubled images, filtered landscapes and contrived composites. Comments shot up; her page-views hit the millions.

In June 2006, having followed Guoleifsdottir’s Flickr ascendancy, an advertising executive for Toyota came calling and assigned her a print campaign for the Prius in Iceland. She was to illustrate the car’s hybrid quality, applying her wintry formalism and production mischief and producing many doubled self-portraits. A star was born, along with the legend of her rise to prominence on Flickr.

In the meantime, another popular Flickr photographer who goes by the name Merkley was building up his own opus. He has even written a treatise extolling digital manipulation called “I’m Not a Photographer,” deriding mainstream art photographers who “show you shoes hanging on wires, pink boxes in the green weeds, little black girls with blue eyes and nuns sitting under billboards of naked men.” On his Flickr profile, he calls the classic film camera “The Robot Camera Machine” and proposes digital processing as the antidote to film’s inhumanity.

Merkley’s style is more R-rated and carnivalesque than Guoleifsdottir’s, but together the two Flickr stars have mounted a case against vérité rawness, in favor of posing, cropping and special effects. Guoleifsdottir and Merkley might have amounted to nothing in analog times, when elaborate deference to institutions, hard-won group shows and expensive years spent in unnoticed toil were the only way to success. But just as certain ne’er-do-well writers have found themselves in blogging, and failed filmmakers have taken to online video, these seemingly out-of-step artists have both invented and mastered the Flickr photograph. Other photographers have added still more levels of processing — including the otherworldly contrasts achieved with high-dynamic-range photography — to the quintessential Flickr image, and it’s becoming only more eye-popping and stylized.

And none of it looks like Diane Arbus or Henri Cartier-Bresson, the photographer many critics still consider the greatest of all time. On Flickr, Cartier-Bresson is no Guoleifsdottir. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that when a prankster posted a Cartier-Bresson photo of a cyclist passing a spiral staircase, passing the photo off as his own, a mob of commenters shouted it down, crying for it to be deleted. “When everything is blurred you cannot convey the motion of the bicyclist,” one commenter carped. “Why is the staircase so ‘soft’? Camera shake?” wrote another. “Gray, blurry, small, odd crop,” someone concluded. That seemed to be the final word.

Points of Entry

THIS WEEK’S RECOMMENDATIONS

BY CONTRAST: Explore your camera’s capacity to do more than take pictures. Maybe the actual shoot is just the first step in acquiring the raw materials (colors, shapes) that get twisted at the computer. If you dare, visit the high-dynamic range, where boring travel shots turn into the landscapes of Coleridge. See the Cambridge in Colour site for online tutorials in HDR. Flickr’s HDR group is also illuminating: flickr.com/groups/hdr/.

LES PHOTOS DES SUPERCUTIES: O.K., so they don’t sound as classy as Cartier-Bresson, but Extra Super Cutie and smoothdude — screen names for exceptional Flickr photographers — might just be photography’s new wave. Other compelling Flickr artists: antimethod, aqui-ali, ar’alani, eyetwist, sweet distin and razorbern. Let go of your snobberies and float down their photostreams.

ORGANIZE YOUR LAUGHTER: HumorFeed.com distills the best news satire on the Web. So you can very, very efficiently find funny things and laugh at them.更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net