Photo Sociology

I like to accompany every article here with a photo. I cruse flickr.com when looking for unusual stuff. When I find an interesting image I will save it in this photo bank. Sometimes I go looking for a photo for a specific topic.

Flickr has a thing where you can see groups of the twenty most recently uploaded photos. Each time you refresh you get another twenty. Flickr generally has over 3,000 photos uploaded every minute.

Most photographs are a waste of good electrons. Most being unworthy of a second glance, but occasionally someone uploads absolute art which makes you want to view their portfolio.

There are other trends which future sociologists could find interesting about the cultures of the early 2000s. There are groups of photos where one can see certain patterns that reappear, and here are the few I’ve noticed:

There are a lot of people out there with a boot fetish. Many photos are candid shots of people wearing boots walking around in a city. Oddly there are other boot fetishists who are transvestites. These people photograph themselves wearing women’s clothing and focus especially on the boots. I wonder why boots are so special to them?

Next, there are a lot of photos of yarn. There are skeins of every color and texture. It is unbelievable how much yarn is there, really unbelievable.

Finally there is the strangest of all. These are photographs of teen age girls who photograph themselves at arms length. They usually enhance their cleavage and pucker their lips for the camera. Oddly those in their later teens stop using the arms length camera angle and switch to photographing themselves in a mirror, but the pucker and the cleavage always seems to be present.

Flickr gives a snap shot of human culture as it presently is. I suppose one can spot other trends there and maybe predict where we are going in the future. All I can see is race of people who are knitters with puckered faces, cleavage, either wearing boots or loving boots. It sounds pretty bleak to me.