Learning Aesthetics

Will Robinson had a post concerning the value of/reason for taking vacation pictures of let’s say over-photographed subjects and areas. Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag have pretty well covered the psycho/social/political aspects of why we “take” pictures and what it means to do so, but it seems to me that there was another question that pretty much got ignored: “Why do we post the pictures that we’ve taken to Flickr?” Sure it’s Will’s picture of Bell’s Beach and my Czech village and that’s significant to us maybe even to our friends and family, but Flickr targets a larger group than the people we know on a first name basis. In some important sense we’re putting these images up for people we’ve never met. What are we sharing; what are we trying to share?

As with most things involving the web I’d suggest the actual answer is we don’t quite know. A while back John Pederson ask and answered, “Why Twitter? Cause I Just Scratched My Butt.” the thrust of which if I have it right was, “…it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun, interesting, radical, or potentially world changing if we knew what we were doing.” We are not however completely without clue; what we are responding to when we take a “place” photograph is beauty, or perhaps more correctly what Kant called the sublime. What we are trying to share with any picture that we publish is our response, what we felt, how the thing or moment changed us. We are in other words making art. You’ll note the small “a” it’s not sacred or precious it’s just a particular kind of information.