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Photoblogging
WGSN, August 29 2005

A visual form of the blog phenomenon, photoblogging is gaining mass popularity and throwing up new approaches to viewing and creating art.

www.casualpasserby.com

Perhaps it's the proliferation of internet-based image sharing software such flickr, the lower cost of digital cameras or even the ubiquitous camera phone that is driving the popularity of photoblogging. With Photoshop software and desktop printing, it's certainly easier then ever to take and disseminate good-quality images.

Whether family snapshots or amateur compositions, photography is a widely available and personal form of expression that goes beyond words.

Photoblogging is becoming a key part of the egalitarian world of photography: images are uploaded daily by professional, amateur and hobby photographers as visual web diaries available for comment and to share. In a commodified age when copyrights restrictions abound and prices of art works rocket, photoblogging is refreshingly democratic and embraces the freedom and reflexivity of the internet.

Even the Tate Modern in London is inviting the public to log their images. Londoners and visitors are being asked to spot the work of Braco Demitrijevi?, who started his The Casual Passer-By series three decades ago, on the sides of buses and take photographs of it using either a camera phone or digital camera, posting their pictures on www.casualpasserby.com.

Demitrijevi? uses anonymous people met by chance and photographed in the street, displaying their images on advertising media such as billboards, banners and public transport. By asking the public to take images of his images, they are echoing his opportunistic and whimsical photographic method – a process that's not dissimilar to modern photoblogging.

Personal expression
"I think everyone tries to use the web and their personal sites in their own way. My photos are largely diaristic or journalistic, rather than making an explicit artistic statement," says Youngna Park, a New York-based photoblogger, who likens the phenomenon to a form of visual scrapbooking.

"I take photos that revolve around my everyday life rather than going places to seek out photos, though sometimes these notions coincide. I know some of my peer photobloggers use their sites as journals, some as portfolios, some as indexes of New York or their lives. There is a lot of variation," she adds.

So is photoblogging all about personal viewpoints? Is it part of the wider trend for baring our souls (and family snapshots) in public? It's not a new theme. Japanese schoolgirl photographer Hiromix epitomised this documentary-like taste for photographic trivia in the late 90s by snapping the minutiae of her daily life including her friends, her cat and her morning bowl of Cheerios.

"People publish their creative output (in all forms) because it's more fun to do so than to stick it in a shoebox," explains Eliot Shepard, the New Yorker behind the Slower.net photoblog, with its imagery of everyday weirdness and wonder in the Big Apple. "I don't think of the medium of photoblogging as artistic per se - I see it as a method or a tool towards making better art," he says, adding that "Sharing impels me to try new things."

"There are plenty of people who photoblog in a single style, or focus on a single subject," explains Jake Dobkin, an established New York photoblogger. "For instance, there are photobloggers that focus just on portraits, or just on streetart, or just on photos taken with toy film cameras.

"One of my favourite things about photoblogging is how varied all the different sites are - I browse twenty or thirty each day and see an amazing range of work," he adds.

Poetry of the everyday
Although the world of photoblogging is vastly varied, it is underpinned by common themes of transition and flux.

"There's something decisive about the act of publishing - staking one's claim to an idea that is good today," says Shepard. "Which in turn demands the question: what will be good tomorrow?"

Even those who simply post their family snapshots are staking their claim to a personal moment in time, while many regular photobloggers capture images of everyday life and chance occurrence.

There are established artists who also currently work on this theme, highlighting a smaller world of fine details and everyday objects that we may no longer notice. Photographer Rinko Kawauchi, who recently exhibited at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, captures the details lost in our everyday lives with beauty, poetry and emotion, whether it's a tap dripping water, a crack in a watermelon's skin or a spoonful of tapioca.

The city
But there's an added accessible "reality" to photoblogs, and many are based on the tradition of street photography (Shepard cites Garry Winogrand, Nan Goldin, Joel Sternfeld, Martin Parr, Diane Arbus and Weegee as his particular influences). The city and urban life lends itself well to the medium, particularly New York, which is the subject of some of the earliest photoblogs, begun back in 2000.

"There are many photographers/photobloggers: large communities in San Francisco and London, and everywhere in between," explains Park. "I think New York may have a prominence because it's so photogenic (the landscape, the people, the sheer number of events/activities/places to photograph) and because the subject matter is really unlimited."

Shepard agrees: "I'm interested in cities - the way they look, the way people relate to the city they live in."

Happy accident?
Many photoblog images are based on chance occurance and personal whimsy, whether it's three ladies chatting on the Tokyo subway or a dog catching a Frisbee in the park. These images celebrate ordinary people and ordinary life.

"I think my style is largely journalistic…I usually shoot what I see on the street, or at the party I've gone to on a Friday night, or my friends hanging out in an apartment or on a rooftop or in the park," explains Park. "I might post photos of friends at the beach, but then the next day some models I shot for a clothing company."

Often the results are surreal and absurd – such as a Doberman dog with bandaged ears or discarded takeaway coffee cups. Abstract images of an apparently mundane goldfish in a plastic bag also make for simply beautiful imagery, while earthworks artist Christo's The Gates in Central Park, New York, are captured in a magical night shot.

However, photoblogging might not always be as "honest" as it first seems. Many of the images are heavily photoshopped and many sites feature a list of equipment used and recommend image-editing software and processes. In fact, editing is a given feature of most photoblogs.

There's also a self-conscious quality to some images, drawing on themes of urban alienation pioneered by the painter Edward Hopper, or even the moody and atmospheric film-still style of contemporary photographer Gregory Crewdson.

Mass voyeurism
Looking at photoblogs can often feel like intruding on someone's private life. Hunkabutta.com is the blog for an expat Canadian living in Tokyo and is aptly subtitled: "A Stranger's Life in Pictures."

"I think that people photoblog for many different reasons. Many people do it to share images with their friends and family, which gives those photoblogs a certain intimacy," says Dobkin.

It's the same kind of mundane voyeurism that drives the popularity of www.foundmagazine.com, a website dedicated to "found stuff: love letters, birthday cards, to-do lists, phone bills, anything that gives a glimpse into someone else's life."

WGSN comment
As far as photoblogging and art are concerned, there is an anti-white-cube stance taken by those professional photographers who post their images on the net. It's also a good way of promoting and selling their work without the need for gallery space.

"On Bluejake.com, I am trying to show the reader the evolution of my work," explains Dobkin. "Revealing this kind of evolution is sort of anti-establishment, insofar as most galleries like to present artists as perfect experts in their chosen subject. "When I do shows, I only put in a few of my best pieces, which of course is a different experience of the work," he adds, making that point that many photoblogs images are part of sets or chronological developments that often make sense only in an entirety.

As for the wider issues of voyeurism, there could well be a backlash to the lack of privacy and control when it comes to sharing images on the internet, as the growing popularity of new peer-to-peer software such as imeem shows.

This free software works from the user's desktop and only invitees are allowed to access this for social networking, blogging and file-sharing. Perhaps photobloggers will become more selective in choosing their audience, and the viewer base more elite, having to be "connected" to the right people in order to view certain photoblogs – a web-based Private View of sorts.

"Photoblogs document a very small part of the world — but things happen there, too, just like everywhere else." Photoblogger David Gallagher (Slate.msn.com)

Open Systems: Rethinking Art c1970 includes works by Braco Demitrijevi?
Tate Modern, London, until September 18.
www.tate.org.uk

Photoblog links
WGSN searches the web for some of the best photoblogging sites

www.flickr.com
A good website for a variety of different photoblogs.

http://nyc.photobloggers.org
For NY photobloggers and amateur photographers.

www.youngna.com
NY-based photographer Yougna Park's site.

www.slower.net
NY-based photographer Eliot Shepard's site.

www.bluejake.com/
NY-based photographer Jake Dobkin's blog.

www.flickr.com/photos/
oceanbornstudios
San Francisco-based Deborah Lattimore's blog with great "sets" of images.

http://kingyo.photolog.cc/g/
Images by Fukuro Kingyo.

www.quarlo.com
Todd Gross, an early photoblogger.

www.rion.nu
Early NY photoblogger Rion Nakaya.

www.ziboy.com
Wen Ling from Beijing, China.