So, i got an unpleasant email from flickr yesterday. and it has nothing to with flickr. they are great folks. but it kind sucks none the less. someone reported me and i have now been classified as moderate. my whole photostream. this effectively means that unless you are signed into flikcr or actively search for the safety filter feature, my photos are no longer viewable. i totally acknowledge that i should have been better about marking my photos, cause i have never paid attention to the the safety filter. but really? my whole phoostream? i have gone through and re-classified things and requested a review, which might fix most of it, but i’m still grumpy about it.
i feel like it was joanne arnold
so today was an awesome day. for one reason only – Joanne Arnold. the woman who publically trashed the politics of my work on the onOne blog (which actually ended up sending a little traffic my way – never bad!). she commented a month ago, but only today did i find it. it went like this
i love being a photographer. sure, i bitch about it sometimes, and get frusterated with all logistics of it and all the shit, but i always knew the artist path was for me and most of the time photography fills all the artistic voids i have. most of the time. actually all of the time. except for one: when i am attempting to express some kind of emotion of mine. politics – easy, sexuality – easy, someone else’s emotions – as easy as they make it. but, there is something about portraying a personal feeling that dams up all my photographic juices.
part of it is fear. fear that i will be like all those other cheesy photographers that just try way too hard to portray personal emotion through something conceptual. or fear that i will do another stupid self portrait that looks whiney and pathetic.fear that if i genuinely put myself out there, it’ll just go horribly wrong!
the other part? confusion. i am truly at a loss as to how i would make that happen. i feel like because photography is documentary in nature it is hard to figure out how to turn that into something that a constructed from something so personal, at least while trying to maintain some kind of realness. how do i place myself in an image (both physically or conceptually) without it being over thought. i find that my best photography comes when someone opens up and i am lucky enough to catch it, when they forget for a moment that the camera is there. how am i going to forget the camera and take the picture?
just a random random thought.
What is up with photographers? What is it that makes us so worried about our prices being known. The Internet is full of resources on how to get noticed, how to follow your creativity, guides to social networking, creating your brand, everything! And I still can’t find one good resource or how much to charge! I think this is a huge oversight by the photography community. The great mentors and the great teachers of the photo realm are really pulling the rug out from under us newbs by being vague and unclear about just how much this career choice costs and how much to charge accordingly.
So I have a blog already. It lives at blog.maxwellander.ca . And now I have another one here. I was trying to think about what I would write here that would make it different from my other one, and I discovered the wordpress iPhone app. Huzzah! This will now be my mobile blog. I have been meaning to start capturing all my fleeting idea as they come to me, but I am often defeated by them not being formulated enough. But who knows, maybe making them publically accessable, coupled with the pressure to update another log regularly will help with my idea formation process.
So here’s to catching fleeting thoughts!
Cheers!
“Mike,
While looking through the entries just now I came upon one from http://www.maxwellander.ca that needless to say is VERY offensive (not the photo but the foul language in their description).
Aren’t there ANY rules about what kind of language we use when posting our photos for the contest? I mean, come on now… it might not offend everyone but it SURE does this woman. And I’m hoping that onOne is WAY classier than to allow that!
It would be great if you’d ask the person entering the photo to clean up their act.
Thanks,
Joanne”
isn’t that awesome?!?!?! i’m pretty sure it is this photo, and the use of the word “bitches”. i don’t know if my response will be approved or not, but just in case, this is it:
“hi joanne,
i don’t even remember which photo i entered… but i’m http://www.maxwellander.ca
if it’s the tractor photo, which is the only one with the correct tag, it’s offensive how? is it cause i used a curse word? i come from a female queer community that does a lot of activist as well as academic (you know, like people getting their phds) work around reclaiming language. beyond that, i’m pretty sure that language should have nothing to do with how we judge photographs. i would prefer to judge them based on, say, te photograph.
my work has been published, written about, awarded and last year was the runner-up in the emerging talent category of the Nikon International Photo Competition which has 55,000 entries worldwide. I’m willing to bet that onOne is happy to have an internationally recognized up and coming artist interested in and using their products.
also, i love that you felt the need to publicly announce the offensiveness of my work without ever even asking me what it was about.
my email is max@maxwellander.ca should you feel like actually engaging in an intelligent conversation about this.”
i’m actually really enjoying this.
also, totally childishly, i googled her and she shares a name with a playboy playmate….