There’s an interesting post over on Ian’s blog about ambition and the photographic lifestyle.
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“I’m always somewhat surprised that there are not more artists reacting to environmental conditions. Perhaps it’s from spending so much time among students, perhaps it’s the latent and fizzling art market that plucked hipsters from bars and placed them on art fair stages, but it still seems so many young artists are still concerned primarily in their work with the self […] Yesterday I received an email from a magazine editor looking for images that addresses the current foreclosure and economic problems, specifically boarded up homes, streets full of for sale signs, etc… […] I couldn’t help but wonder where are all the great photographers who are addressing this subject? […] Since last spring I’ve been photographing much of the retail end of the economy downtown for a new project […] In doing so much research I’ve come across a few others who share some of the same subject and concern, and certainly many Flickr examples. But the few I’ve come across pale in comparison to the number of ‘drunken party pictures’, ‘ambiguous ambiguity’ or the ‘pretty portraits of pretty people’ projects. […] I simply can’t help but wonder when a topic so large looms in front of young artists why not the desire to address it through their work? Is the self still so important? Will it really be how we remember the beginning of the 21st century?” - Brian Ulrich
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Given that I was looking for the most wanted photo on Flickr the other day it seems only logical to point out the ‘amateur’ winners of the Sony World Photography Awards. It is quite interesting that the chosen images are extremely similar to the usual editorial/commercial stuff…
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Having just started to look at Komar and Melamid’s Most Wanted Paintings - paintings created based on actual polls, where people could say what they liked - I thought finding the photographic equivalent couldn’t possibly be that hard. I went to Flickr, which I use only very occasionally (and thus don’t really know all that well), and went looking for the photo that had the largest number of people calling it a “favorite”. The utterly unscientific results: 4,967 people call this photo a favourite (with 1,308 comments), followed by this photo (2,464 favourite votes), this photo (2,238), and this photo (1,935). Over at photo.net, the all-time favourites (based on all-time average ratings) are this photo, this one, and this one.
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