Using Flickr.com
April 16, 2008
Time to write about Flickr.com, the online photo sharing site. In the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly of Web 2.0, Flickr is the good.
Recently came across two examples of using Flickr that caught my attention — for being both theme driven and focused on something local.
The first uses an individual Flickr account to take a quirky look at the history of an art institution, the second creates a Flickr group to document the fate of a local landmark. We often think of Web 2.0 applications as being geographically non-specific. Using very different approaches, these make use of Flickr to explore and share images that focus on a specific sense of place.
Every Chair at the Visual Studies Workshop is a project by Luke Strosnider that includes over 500 images. The Midtown Plaza group is organized to document Midtown Plaza in downtown Rochester — the first urban shopping mall built in the 1960s, and now slated for demolition.
The “Every Chair…” Flickr account functions as both exhibition and catalog. With all the added benefits of being on Flickr — including the ability to use online commenting to share thoughts with with the artist and others viewing the images. A lot of photographers might hesitate to publish work online this way. To address this, the uploaded image sizes are limited to 600 x 800 pixels, and each full-size view includes “© All rights reserved.”
The Midtown Plaza group includes a discussion page that allow people to share information about the Mall, including one thread on trading photographer’s experiences dealing with security and another with a link to a 1963 promotional film on Rochester featuring Midtown Mall.
A single image on flicker can be linked to — and viewed from — another website. Flickr feeds can send groups of images to another blog or website. Both save on server space, since the individual image files remain stored on Flickr.com.
So if you have a digital camera and/or digital image files to share, why wait? Check out — and make use of — Flickr.com.
Online exhibit, Rochester: A Community of Workers
December 30, 2007
On November 17 at the Labor Lyceum (NYSUT Hall, 30 North Union Street) moderator Jon Garlock of the Labor Council Education Committee introduced the new online exhibit, “Rochester: A Community of Workers.”
In the early 1990s Jon Garlock and Marilyn Anderson photographed and interviewed hundreds of union workers in nearly 40 different Rochester union worksites, documenting a wide range of union labor — industrial, construction, communications, transportation and public and service sector jobs — and creating the exhibit “Rochester: A Community of Workers.”
It was my privledge to design a version of this photo and text exhibit for the web, which can be viewed at: www.rochesterlabor.org/exhibit/
In addition to showing the online exhibit at the November 17 Lyceum, sector overviews were given by Tom Privitere (PEF), Dan Maloney (UAW 1097) and Ray Kuntz (Laborers 435). Each of them spoke about changes since the photographs were taken in the early 1990s and led discussion about about the future of work and unions in Rochester.