IDEA No 71
PHOTO SHARING
Before the Large Hadron Collider, LHC stood for Les Horribles Cernettes, a doo-wop band made up of CERN employees. In 1992, a photo of the group was the first image uploaded to the Web.
The photographer was Silvano de Gennaro, a developer at CERN, who managed the band. His co-worker Tim Berners-Lee was looking for an image to test a new version of his browser that could support images. So a badly Photoshopped image was the first picture on the Web. It was a sign of things to come.
Surprisingly, brands like Kodak were slow to take advantage of this new opportunity. Despite developing a digital camera in 1975, Kodak stuck stubbornly to film, fearful of sabotaging its own business model. It was burying its head in the sand. The mass adoption of digital cameras in the late ’90s brought with it a number of sites where you could upload and store images. The first – Webshots – was launched in 1999. Others such as Photobucket, Picasa and Yahoo! Photos followed in the early 2000s.
As digital cameras became cheaper, photo-sharing came into its own. Launching in 2004, a year before Facebook and YouTube, Flickr soon became the premier image-hosting site. Allowing you to share your pictures, and follow and connect with other users, it was much more than a photo-sharing platform. It was a social network.
Slow to react to the smartphone revolution, Flickr left space for the competition. Originally starting out as a geolocation service, Instagram saw that Foursquare had beaten them to it. It changed its focus to one simple aspect of its service – photos. Allowing users to share photos on the move gave it the edge. Also offering simple filters to make images look better (and the photographers’ lives look cooler), Instagram usurped Flickr as the photo-sharing platform of choice.
Recently, sites like Pinterest have added a new twist to photo sharing, allowing users to repost or pin images from across the Web to create themed moodboards. Now everybody can be a curator.
The Web has become an extension of our identities. Displaying our interests, or at least the interests we wish to present to the world, offers friends and followers a snapshot of our personality. There is no easier way to do this than through images. We are what we share. Must be a lot of nude girls and kittens surfing the Web.■
‘Launching in 2004, Flickr was much more than a photo-sharing platform. It was a social network.’
Penelope Umbrico’s Sunset Portraits from 11,827,282 Flickr Sunsets on 01/07/13 highlights the futility of individual assertion through a cultural meme. The title of the artwork reflects the ever-growing number of sunset pictures on Flickr. As this number only lasts an instant, its recording is analogous to the act of photographing the sunset itself.