Bethesda Terrace - 219, 2013
(Click
on image to see larger.)
I am of the generation raised to
think that you’re not a legitimate artist until
you’ve had a “show” at a gallery where people stand around on a Friday
night wearing turtlenecks, swill wine and admire your work.
I’ve never had a gallery show.
I’ve been in a few, but none that
were just about me. I’m not complaining, though. I haven’t been diligent in
pursuing such exposure. Besides, I have the vacuum tubes of the Internet to keep
me warm.
For over ten years I’ve been posting
photographs almost every day at one or another online sites, the idea being
that if I post something every day by the end of the year I’ll have at least a
few photographs I think are worth something.
That’s been pretty much the case.
The unexpected consequence is that doing so has also connected me with a large
community of kindred souls. To be honest, this kinship has been the best part.
But the visibility’s not bad, either. My “art,” such as it is, is seen by far
more people every day than could ever see it in a gallery.
Take this past week. More than six
hundred people have asked to see what I’m doing on a daily basis. Under normal
circumstances, the number who actually click on the thumbnail-sized images to
see them larger is much smaller, around a hundred.
But this past week two of my
photographs were featured on Flickr’s “Explore” page, where photographs that some
faceless Flickr employee or computer algorithm think is worth presenting on a
larger stage gets shown. The payoff is that the number of
people who are exposed to your is huge. In the case of the photo above, more than fourteen sixteen eighteen nineteen twenty thousand people have clicked on it to see it larger.
That’s no small crowd. And even
though they might have been sitting in their pajamas in Paris, Seoul, St.
Petersburg or Cincinnati instead dressed up in their best turtleneck at a
gallery on a Friday night, their recognition and kind thoughts are no less affirming. We’re all sharing, enjoying and learning from each other, and along
the way creating a community that makes us all much better global citizens
(For all of the vanity of
thinking that the popularity of the image shown above is all because of
something I did, I’m of the sneaky suspicion that this photo was inspired, however, subconsciously, by Eugene Smith’s
A Walk to the Paradise Garden from his Smith's 1955 Family of Man show at New York’s Museum of
Modern Art. )
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