The images are ones I would expect to be able to see in many locations in my home town.
While the exotic exotic images today come from Rigamarole:
I would not expect to be able to see these scenes anywhere in the UK.
So the first two, taken by Tampen of his daughter, show me somethng from my everyday world but with the feel of the exotic - they are richly semiotic. And the second two photos show us Rigmarole's images from Bombay. These are sights which belong to 'other people's' everyday experiences and are probably mundane to them, but unfamiliar to me. I think that both the pairs of photos show us images which are 'strongly cultural'; they seem more heavily saturated with semiotic stuff than many other images from the same culture may have been. They tell me all sorts of things about how life goes on, values etc. That is to say the images say so many things about the culture from which they come and I think that this is why I find both pairs very powerful.
I like the way I can see such a rich cultural mix of images on Flickr, and looking at the images side by side like this, we can see the primitive roots of aspects of western fashion. Photographs from less technologically advanced countries are the ones which seem the most exotic and 'othered' on Flickr however. i think this must be because they are mainly (but not exclusively) brought to Flickr by people from technologically advanced cultures. This is 'the norm' of the Flickr perspective.
3 comments:
This is so ground breaking Dr Joolz.
No one is doing Flickr at AERA and I think the material culture stuff is sadly absent from the discourse.
Keep thinking!
Flickr is very Americanised in many ways - the debates about "other countries" last year really annoyed me because I had never considered myself as "other" til then. Great stuff :)
Thank you Drkate and Anya for your interested responses!! It is a strange feeling being 'othered' I agree Anya, especially if you are not used to it. I felt 'othered' at times in New York a few years ago when people could not work out where I was from - and even when I told them they had not always heard of the UK!!
Funnily enough someone on Flickr once 'shouted' at me for holding the values I had, as they assumed everyone would agree with my American perspective (she was American!) This was highly ironic as she was assuming that everyone had an American perspective, even people from the UK. She was against 'Americanisation' of the world, but assumed we were all 'Americanised'. I still have not fully worked out what I think of that incident....
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