Yeah, I know I should be moving in here to defend freedom of speech. And I do appreciate that the whole Yahoo fiasco has done awful damage to Flickr. But what's really pushing me away from Flickr at the moment is much more personal. A couple of the groups I hang out on, the ones where all my local pictures, just seemed to be being ruined by some people's rather snide take on street photography.
Now, I'm all for the freedom to photograpph whoever and whatever you want if they're in public. It's not the pictures that get me, it's the comments and tags these people feel the need to annotate their pictures with. I mean, do you really need to tag your picture of someone with "fat" and "chav"? Or a picture of a perfectly average looking woman in her early 40s with "haggard" and some jibe about plastic surgery? And the funniest thing is that these clowns then post their pictures to groups identifying themselves with street photographers like Cartier-Bresson or Martin Parr, yet they just don't seem to understand the concept of letting the picture speak for itself, whcih to me is the power of the great street photgrapherrs like the ones they seem to admire. I rather think that if you wouldn't be prepared to call someone a fat chav to their face you probably shouldn't tag their picture "fat chav" either.
It's going to be an interesting day when one of the "untermensch" these people enjoy mocking so much turns out to be able to use the internet and sees one of the pictures of themselves. Maybe they'll pop along to a flickrmeet to have a chat with their photographer, that I would pay to photograph.
Anyhow, at least for now this place seems like a much nicer place to hang out than Flickr, and being here venting is stopping me from commiting an act of verbal violence on someone's Flickr stream too. Now time to go out and take some pictures in the sun, it's time I took some stuff specifically for this stream.
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Published at 19:22
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