Hair today, gone tomorrow - will online friendships Flickr and die?

Everyone on Flickr is so damn nice. Sure enough, there are some breathtaking images on display. Absolutely worldclass stuff. But there's some pretty mundane shots too. And even the better ones could do with a tweak here and there.

In my experience real world photographers are a pretty miserly breed. Stood alone waiting for the sun to fall, you may exchange a pleasantry or two with the fellow stood beside - but there's no eye contact. You clutch your lens and face forward. That's if you have a companion. Often you haunt the sunset alone - an outcast, a wanderer questing for mysterious images - truths - with which to amaze civilisation upon your return.

There's lots of sneering in technical photography too. Lots of F-stops and apertures and shutters for one to misplace, lots of room for some scientific type to lavish you with dismissive snorts and "hahs".

Online, however, the photographer is, so Flickr leads me to believe, a breed apart. Comments crowd about your capture with praise and applause. "Great capture", "Nice one", "Cool", "Love it!!!" - with such a vocabularly and nothing more you could interact with all and never would anyone think sneer to another about your limited lexicon - let alone your F-stops.

My first assumption on visiting the page was that there'd be an awful lot of "tried too hard and f*cked the exposure - lousy work - pack it in". There is not. Of course, praise can be plentiful or it can be scarce. Perhaps the harshest comment is no comment at all.

Photography, however, seems to play second string to community on Flickr. What can one say of a community with a shared exchange of some ten words - nine if you don't count "nice", as one quite rightly should not.

My immediate reaction is to say that it will be a shortlived community at best. Imagine a real world friend with whom you often spoke. In two word couplets "great, mate". The relationship would lack a certain frisson. It is easy to look at the vast tracts of positive global whitewash and denounce Flickr as something trivial and banal. Transcedent images, washed with a stream of effluent praise, no stronger than cowgum.

This would be incorrect, however. Behind the scenes, there is more meaningful contact, in niche groups. The discussion is as much social as it is photographic. The photos are in some cases the tip of the iceberg, and it is beneath the water that groups of friends share their private thoughts as well as their public back slapping. Moreover, the photographs, as catalyst, give focus to some rather esoteric niches. Have a look if you don't believe me - maybe you have been waiting all your life to join the "Japanese Red Hunting Lizard" pool. You won't find that in the back of the Express.

At this stage you realise that not everyone on Flickr is a professional photographer (myself excepted). For others, this is not a showcase of artwork, but a diary of life. Friday nights out, Birthday parties, the mundane shared not to argue aperture, or poo-poo shutter speeds, but simply to bring their friends in this global community up to speed on what they're up to.

If they want to throw a few words of congratulations about whilst they're at it, where's the harm in that? At the end of the day, that's the point of the thing.


This great shot of Ms. Spears pre-sheers the work of www.natanael.blogspot.com, of Flickr.