The concept of gallery is wide. The dictionary gives 12 different results:
Perhaps most relevant to the area of art are:
6. a room, series of rooms, or building devoted to the exhibition and often the sale of works of art.
13. a collection of art for exhibition.
However, also important are:
5. any group of spectators or observers, as at a golf match, a Congressional session, etc.
4. the general public, esp. when regarded as having popular or uncultivated tastes.
Referring back to my interest in art as communication – art for the people rather than art for the artist – I’m interested in galleries that are available to everyone, not for the select few. I don’t mean that in a way that the public are not welcome in galleries – the White Cube, Matt’s Gallery – but that for the majority of the public it wouldn’t occur to them to go there, for various reasons. Even popular galleries like the Tate Modern, the Barbican, the ICA, the National Gallery, the Hayward, the RCA, the V&A – are not necessarily on everyone’s plans for the day. So I thought about using the everyday – the street, our surroundings – performance art, happenings, my own first semester exhibition which occurred wherever and whenever the opportunity or urge arose – bus stops, the studio, tube stations, wherever… It also relates back to my studio work on the question of Potential Art being all around us:
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But ‘Everywhere’ is a bit of a wide topic, so I wanted to filter it down to the specific that is accessible to – and used by – everyone. The most obvious gallery then, is the Internet. It is available to almost everyone and almost everyone uses it in some form. It is a method of communication – if not the main method – today, which I am very much focussed on in my studio practise.
It is also used more and more to post images – in news stories, emails, cartoons, jokes, virals, visual representations, documentation. Not only images but sound, music, action, events, instruction, performance (eg my flashmob entry). More and more people have a blog, a website. Every company or business has a website, most artists have a blog or site of some kind. Even at art college part of our practise is to have a blog, which you are reading right now
This blog is an exhibition – a display of work for observation. And it is accessible to all.
The internet itself is used as a medium in some art. We now have “net art“, which is claimed to be “part of new media art and electronic art” and which uses the internet as its primary medium, producing work including:
- websites
- e-mail projects
- artistic software
- Internet-based or networked installations
- online video, audio or radio works
- networked performances
- code poetry
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However, I am more interested in how the internet acts as a gallery – a meeting point or viewing point for this work to be seen.
A gallery is a place to view or experience work, it is not purely a storage place. The audience is an essential component of the concept of a gallery.
The internet is a huge place, so to filter my search again I want to look into photo galleries. In particular flickr. As the internet has grown and the use of digital cameras has soared, photo galleries have popped up everywhere. A few of the most popular include PhotoBox, PhotoBucket, DeviantArt, PhotoNet and Clikpic – but flickr arguably contains the widest range of users.
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The growth of flickr as a social phenomenon
Before it was bought by Yahoo in 2005, flickr’s userbase were internet savvy ‘early adopters‘ – young, technical workers in the media or internet industry, heavy in designers with more photographic experience than the general public.
From its creation in 2002, flickr was designed with a publicly available API. to be ‘Open Platform‘ – meaning anyone could build tools to work with it – (something that facebook has built extensively on, now having over 20,000 applications built by external users). If you didn’t like the experience provided by the standard flickr upload, you could build your own. This was significant in that it encouraged the growth of third party flickr tools – with the result that its use spread beyond its original tech-savvy base. This had a major impact on the social phenomenon of flickr. You were not reliant on flickr to make tools.
Another important feature of flickr right from the start was its adoption of folksonomy and social networking. You could now use flickr tools to put your photos on social networking sites such as your blog, MySpace page, LiveJournal etc – and start sharing them. The power of bringing together tools on an open API with the social networking aspect was immense – far more than the sum of its parts. From this flickr became a social phenomenon. People built incrementally faster and better ways of sharing.
By the advent of Web 2.0 people had realised that you couldn’t predict what people would use your tool for – so the best way was to let the market decide. Flickr was created with an API – an interface that people can build their own applications to work with, and use flickr in whatever way they needed. Ultimately flickr was just storing the pictures and had no idea what the site would ultimately be used for. It may be just a host to store snapshots for friends to share (similar to PhotoBucket today) – or it may begin to house photos for professional photographers (similar to Alamy); become something more creative and experimental (similar to DeviantArt); or simply be a storage base to order prints from digital photos (similar to PhotoBox.
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Flickr today
Ultimately flickr was a business and was bought out by Yahoo in 2005. Since then, whilst it has retained part of its ’serious’ photography base, it has expanded to include more of the mass market. There are now over two billion images on flickr.
It has become a mass storage device, allowing users to share personal photos and as a base to link photos to blogs, chat rooms etc. Its popularity has been massively supported by its Organizr tools. You can tag not only your own photos, but also other people’s (Folksonomy), allowing annotation and categorization globally – not only by the creator or other experts, but also by the viewer or consumer. Within Organizr there are also features such as Sets and Collections where you can group, categorize or index your own photos as you would in an album; Groups where you can add them to public series on a theme; Map, where you can pin each photo to its location on yahoomaps; and Batch Organize to edit large batches of photos at once. A Blog option has been added, as well as Video (although so far this hasn’t really taken off).
Organizr also smooths the running of the site, making it very easy to use – with automatic resizing, rotation and drag ‘n’ drop tools. Flickr also provides both private and public storage so the user can set privacy controls to determine who can view every image, including ‘group pools’ where only members of the group can view images; ‘friends & family’ where only contacts can view images; and even a ‘guest pass’ system which allows private photos to be shared with non Flickr-members. A ‘pass’ can be emailed to anyone who you want to grant access to view to. It can apply to all, some groups of, or some individual photos. Photos can also be licensed for use by others under six types of Creative Commons Licence
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Flickr as a gallery
Flickr has a huge collaborative database of publicly viewable categorized photos, with a huge underlying structure. It is a mass gallery of galleries, in amongst the immense gallery of the web itself. It has galleries according to theme – by subject, artist, type of camera, location, colour – any theme you can think of. My first hit today was “Tell a story in 5 frames (Visual story telling)“.
As a gallery, flickr’s major component would be its social history or reportage aspect. It documents people’s lives. It is the people’s equivalent of Magnum - a living archive of everyday reportage photography – from Robert Capa to Richard Billingham; Trent Parke to Martin Parr.
It is also often a collaborative project. Just one collaborative art project I am involved in myself is FirstView, where a group of photographers take a photo on the first day of every month to document their daily lives. There is no aim to be ‘artistic’ in the shot, it is supposed to be a record shot to depict a part of your day – it can be shot on compact, disposable, mobile or SLR; digital or film, it doesn’t matter – the important part is the recording of our lives. It has now been running for 2 years, but the project is a long-term one – to document our lives over time, over 5, 10, 20 years, as we age. To document the everyday, and the special moments within the everyday. To see how our lives change and how they stay the same.
My gallery for 2007 is here, and my gallery so far for 2008 is here.
There is also the professional aspect – as well as the opportunity to exhibit your pictures, the social aspect of it allows peer review. Discussion can take place over any aspect of your work – from analysis of technique and materials, to aesthetics, philosophy and meaning. Not purely over whether a shot is technically well-orchestrated, but if it makes a good picture by nature of what it conveys. The social-networking aspect means you can find work – and other photographers – on any aspect of photography you are interested in.
You can browse according to theme, location, subject, style, period. You can network and find other photographers or work that may interest you, and you can use it as a means of finding work, people and exhibitions external to the internet.
Anyone can put up an exhibition in flickr, and there are almost infinite exhibitions to view.
