2 years ago

Before the internet, photo sharing sites & social media, there was mail art. I have always had a fondness for creating conversations using images and in 1998 I began my own project: ArtPals; documented and posted on-line and continued on fotolog.

In 2001, feeling powerless following the attacks of 9/11, I started theARTproject where people could post images in response to the events and aftermath of that day. As the site grew, I thought artists who were continuing to make work responding to 9/11 would find value in using their images to “discuss” the situation.  The discussions gave contributors to the site an opportunity to respond with images to work that had been previously posted. Inspired and hopeful that others would be interested in such an endeavor, I began looking for a programmer with whom I could collaborate to create a threaded “chat” (ArtDialogue) that would consist only of images.

In 2003, I discovered fotolog; fotolog was the first of the “social media” photo sharing sites and in its infancy it was an intimate community of people participating for the sheer joy of sharing images. Once i began posting there, I no longer felt the need to continue developing the project I had envisioned as ArtDialogue.

I became “addicted” to fotolog when almost immediately I noticed the amazing synchronicity between images people were posting. To me, it appeared that they were engaged in unwitting dialogues which sometimes seemed to occur between people who were unaware of each other.  I chose to facilitate this by leaving links to what I found to be “related” images in the comments section (instead of writing “beautiful” or “love the light in this”) and soon other people began doing the same.

There were groups on fotolog to which you could add images related to a common theme, but in the beginning starting a group was difficult and so I began “mini-groups” by inviting people to leave links to their images in my comments that corresponded to the image I had posted. One of these pages I called the o_o_O game:  it called for images containing circles and this page did eventually evolve into a fotolog group: the O O O game.  I have continued the circle love with a gallery on flickr and so It felt like a real serendipity to encounter, during the course of ArtDialogue, Manbartlett’s fascination with circles and his project #circlefriday.

An outgrowth of my “mini-groups” on fotolog was the concept of shared flogs where a small number of people, (who had already been exchanging images together) could share a single flog and post related images. For the most part we tried to create true conversations by posting images that related in some way (other than simply to the theme itself) to the one that preceded it, thereby creating little collaborative “movies”.  Often these shared pages resulted in sequences that were astounding in their lyrical beauty. This is one of the things I miss most about fotolog and these were a few of my favorites:

Many of the same themes have continued on flickr in private groups, but they don’t have quite the intimacy that their original flog incarnations did. You can see the difference for yourself by comparing the only one of these wonderful shared flgs that still flourishes on fotolog: the ever amazing ci_da_de to its flickr counterpart.

Virtual life follows physical life and two of my image based relationships developed into extremely intense 1 on 1 dialogues with 2 different people, one was featured in the fotolog book and the other continues on various platforms to this day: my dialogues with brasilian artist fernando lopes can be viewed on fotola: museu and on flickr: that_little_voice.

(nb: i have not included links to any of the fotolog conversations as they would be too difficult to follow. fotolog did not initially grasp the importance of permalinks and consequently their programming decisions rendered many amazing collaborative projects impotent)

In addition to projects which incorporate public photo sharing tools, much of my personal work (both painting & photography) has relied on “image conversations”. Over the years I have created many projects that relate (to a greater or lesser degree) to this concept of a dialogue composed of images, including participation in a number of 1stfans projects (notably @thatwaszen’s and joseph kosuth’s ). Below are links to some of these explorations:

So, while ArtDialogue is the culmination of many years pursuing the concept of communicating with images, no discussion of this subject would be complete without the mention of the ever popular photo memes. For the most part these sites post a weekly theme where photographers can respond by adding a link to their own image which corresponds to that theme; some geo-tag, some display thumbnails or have a viewer, some are “competitions” but all function to form a community of photobloggers across the web. Over the years many other such projects have come and gone (notably Brandon Stone’s WeeklyShot), below are some of my favorite active ones

above: a sequence of images from t_l_v