On photoblogs, there are no mundane shots

Across the Internet, photoblog Web sites, which are part visual diary, part photo gallery, celebrate the mysterious and the ordinary. Reflecting on the Mirror Project

June 18, 2005 9:01 a.m. PT

4 min read

Blogs are great for those who like to write and wonderful for those who like to read, but what about people who don't like to do either?

They are expressing themselves through photoblogs, Web sites that are part visual diary, part photo gallery, where in recent years anyone with a digital camera and Internet connection can take part. Many sites have made it easier than ever to share photographs, including Fotolog.net and Flickr.com, which was recently bought by Yahoo.

Among the most interesting photoblogs to peruse are group oriented, where many people post pictures, all of them around a central theme. You will find abandoned bicycles, subway scenes, pets. Group sites celebrate the ordinary, the mundane, the ephemeral, things that everyone can understand.

The Mirror Project
The Mirror Project, at mirrorproject.com, gathers self-portraits reflected in different surfaces: windows, bodies of water, shiny balloons and rearview mirrors. More than 29,000 photos have been submitted from all seven continents since the project began in October 1999.

It began as "Friends of Jezebel's Mirror," or FOJM, a spin-off site to Jezebel's Mirror, where a Web designer named Heather Champ posted 250 of her own self-portraits after the death of her parents, who had been the primary documenters of her life.

For the Mirror Project, Champ invites guest curators to sift through the submissions and collect photos around themes. Some of these have been Ikea, Sept. 11 and books.

The value of the self-portraits, from supermodel-esque poses to corner-of-the-eye glimpses, is that people are less likely to put on airs when they are photographing themselves.

Guess Where
New York photobloggers have created a group photoblog game called "GuessWhere" on Flickr.com, where people post photos from specific cities and others have to guess where they were taken (often with hints).

The original, and most vibrant, is Guess Where NYC, with a hundred or so members. That inspired Guess Where DC, Guess Where San Francisco and Guess Where Tokyo. (At Flickr.com, type in "guesswhere.") In New York, all five boroughs qualify. And the photos are sometimes well-recognized places with a twist--in a reflection, say, or close up.

Those posting photos have learned never to underestimate people's intimacy with the city. One challenger posted a shot of a round street sign that read "Guardians of Hydrocephalus Research Foundation--Water on the Brain." Within a day, a person identified it as a sign at Sackett Street and Court Street in Brooklyn.



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Challenge
A number of photoblogs pose one-word themes as a challenge for photographers. Wordphoto, at wordphoto.org, often poses words that have multiple definitions.

The interpretation of the word can express as much of the photographer's personality as the actual photo. "Slide," for example, was expressed both as a child on a playground and a professor with an overhead projector.

Photo Friday, at photofriday.com, and Thursday Challenge, at spunwithtears.com/thursday.html, each pose a weekly theme, where people can then submit links to photos.

Sadness
Digital photography makes it cheap to take photos of things that are otherwise ignored in daily life--like broken umbrellas, discarded bicycles and abandoned televisions. But vibrant collections along such

ordinary themes have shown up on Fotolog.net, a popular photoblogging site. The hundreds upon hundreds of photos from around the world reinforce a sense of universality.

Jason Wilson developed a fascination for the carcasses of mutilated and destroyed bicycles and started a group photoblog on Fotolog.net that quickly attracted contributors. "It turned out that many people had one, two or 40 of these pics sitting around looking for a context to thrive in," Wilson said.

Europeans, who commonly use bicycles to get around rural areas and some cities, have contributed many of the most provocative photos.

"Sad Umbrellas" got its start with Eric Brown, who moved to New York from Los Angeles six years ago and became fascinated with the number of abandoned umbrellas on the street. He wanted to save the graceful, broken umbrellas, but that was impractical. Inspired by the "Sad Bikes" group, he found a home for his infatuation on Fotolog.net. Now there is also a "Sad TVs" and "Sad Carts" (for shopping carts).

The Anonymous Archives
Almost all photoblogs have a contemporary feel--a product of the instant digital photography age. By contrast, bighappyfunhouse.com has the feel of a group photoblog that pulls the past into the present, with a jarring voyeuristic effect.

For years, Ron Slattery, a 40-year-old entrepreneur from Chicago, has scoured flea markets, garage sales and trash bins for old photos. Last year, he started putting them on the Internet: vacation photos from the beach, snapshots of pets, family portraits at birthday parties.

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The photos are anonymous, both the subjects and the photographers. At a time when we routinely browse photo albums on Snapfish and Kodak's gallery, there is something disquieting to see photos that were never meant to be public. His photos span from the late 1800s to almost the present--a mishmash of hairdos, fashions and photo quality throughout the decades. So far, he has put up more than 900 photos. He often wonders about the people shown, smiling and not, and where their lives took them after that instantaneous meeting with a lens.

In May, he received an e-mail message from a man who had found a picture of himself and a friend, who was wearing a Hello Kitty costume, on his site. The picture was taken in 1982 in Houston when the two men, then teenagers, were hired by someone to pass out balloons at the grand opening of an office supply store. "What is driving me CRAZY is this...How did you come across that photo?" the man wrote.