Account inactive go to: www.jamesdodd.net's photostream

Flickr, whether I like it or not has been an ever present with my photographic journey.

Apparently I've been on here for approaching 6 years now, tho I've only realistically been interested in photography in a sort of "active" way for 4 of those.

If my archives were available for everyone to view you’d see a transition from using flickr as a place to store holiday snapshots and photographs of ebay items to me purchasing a dSLR and trying too hard to create interesting photographs by pushing the boundaries of what was visually acceptable in a bad way.

In some vain attempt to find a style or a voice I’d try everything from HDR, partial colouring, to digital cross processing, I like to look at this time as finding out what definitely doesn’t work, rather than thinking of it as me having wasted too much time faffing around trying to polish some turds.

I’d eventually stumbled upon street photography; shyly take photographs from waist level without any knowledge about what I’d have in my final picture. I’d join a community, which would include people I call friends today and people who helped me progress as a photographer by offering critical advice and help when I most needed it.

I’d study at college and pursue photojournalism. My work would become more narrative and I’d start to feel like I understood what I wanted to do with photography, something I had never felt before and that sort of brings us up to present day in a round about way.

Unfortunately over the course of this time, the roll flickr has to play in my photography has somewhat diminished and I now see that it doesn’t have a future on the path I want to take.

Disappointingly what for me was once a bustling centre of enlightening conversation, whit and education has in recent times been little less than it once was. I’ve made fantastic friends and had great conversations on what I’d call a once great platform for photography. But as it stands now, the relevancy of this social network has slipped, the lack of development and care by it’s owners has left it years behind newer rivals which has meant that for the past 3 years much of my online activity has become centred elsewhere as has much of the communites I established here.

Recently flickr has felt like a drain resources and I can’t help but feel my time spent here could no doubt have been better applied elsewhere.

But this isn’t the only reason that I’m considering the role the internet plays in my photography.

The image presented above is from a body of work presently titled “The Walkers” which I have yet to share online - in fact, this is the first time this particular image has been shared publically.

I’ve been sitting on this work for a matter of months now, and have come close on many occasions to uploading it to flickr, adding it to my website, putting it on my collectives website and sending it out to some blogs to get featured. But what is the point?

I no longer understand why I put work online beyond it being through habbit.
This is especially true in the context of singular images in the way flickr represents them when I consider that my work largely relates around a series structure at the moment.

In addition to this, collectively we as photographers frequently moan about how people want to use our work for free, and yet each and every day we are happy to give our work away to our very consumers through our social networks, our websites and our blogs.

I feel this model isn’t the right model for everyone, even though it’s the model most of us follow. We seem to follow it because it’s something, which successful photographers do, and these are people we admire and want to imitate. And it is fine for some photographers, such as those photographers who earn their living through print sales and use the internet as advertisements for their work, or maybe those who command great fees for commissions and use their personal work is a way to attract new business, but this just isn’t how I operate at the moment.

Right now, the only way people consume my work is online for free and this is something I feel I need to fix by creating more physical ways of viewing my work and less free digital ones.

I hope that the time I will save by not visiting this place like I did before will mean I will be more productive in my own work and more productive in the communities we developed here, but now live on elsewhere.

But before I leave, I’d like to thank everyone I’ve met here and wish them well for the future, hopefully our paths will one day cross again, hopefully in the real world rather than digital.

If you want, you can find me at the following places:
Twitter @jamesdodd
Facebook: facebook.com/jamesdodd
G+: plus.google.com/112329087841379527102/

Personal website: jamesdodd.net
Collective website: statementimages.co.uk

Street Reverb: streetreverbmagazine.com
Photo Sheffield: photosheffield.org.uk