We spend so much time uploading and browsing through pictures online that it’s often impossible to conceptualize how our gargantuan online photo albums compare with the few paper ones remaining on our shelves. Artist and photographer Erik Kessels has changed that by curating part of an exhibit in the Amsterdam avant-garde photography museum Foam that makes the vastness of the Internet’s photo collection tangible and visible. Kessels printed out every photo uploaded to Flickr within a 24-hour period and dumped them all in the gallery’s rooms, covering the space with mounds of amateur and professional photographs taken all over the world that flow through multiple exhibit rooms and give us a gorgeous idea of just how extensive our culture’s photography database is. The image above represents just one part of one day of Flickr’s pictures. [via Craft]
Flickr self-portraitist clickflashwhirr has been taking a picture of herself in the same position (and with the same expression) every day for over 500 days. The concept is nothing new, of course, but instead of compiling the images into a minute-long video set to her favorite Death Cab for Cutie song, she averaged all the shots into one strangely compelling fake face. The actual composite was done by Tiemen Rapati, who says he “simply [counted] the individual RGB values for each pixel and for each portrait, and [divided] those values by the number of portraits.” The resultant image isn’t particularly noteworthy in itself — it just looks like a nice, soft-focus vision of a girl — but the idea that it’s an amalgamation of more than a year of someone’s face, and as such represents a person that never actually existed on any given day is pretty interesting. [via Geekologie]
We’ve been obsessed with the beautiful data visualization maps that Eric Fischer creates for quite some time now. In his latest series, See something or say something, Fischer looks at geotagged Flickr photos and tweets, and as always, the resulting images are both surprisingly illuminating and pretty to look at. “Red dots are locations of Flickr pictures,” he explains. “Blue dots are locations of Twitter tweets. White dots are locations that have been posted to both.” Click through to check out a few from his collection, and if you like what you see, find the entire set here.
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Italian photographer Filippo Minelli’s ongoing series Contradictions, which we spotted over on Morpheus Media’s Tumblr, places the spray-painted names of modern obsessions like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Apple in underdeveloped locations across the globe. As he explained to Wooster Collective back in 2008, “Technologies and the marketing behind them usually push the almost religious aspect of their evolution… and the users are pushed to live in an intense way the abstraction from reality, living technologies only as an idea and sometimes without even knowing their real functions… what I want to do by writing the names of anything connected with the 2.0 life we are living in the slums of the Third World is to point out the gap between the reality we still live in and the ephemeral world of technologies.” Click through to check out a gallery of Minelli’s work.
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With Mother’s Day only 48 hours away, we’ve got our gifts taken care of, but we’ve still got moms on the brain. So, for this week’s Flickr Found Photo Friday, we searched “Mommy dearest” — a mother cliché that also happens to be a misspelling (or is that “corrected spelling”?) of one the greatest campy memoirs-turned-movies of all time. The photos we turned up included the expected (beautiful, hilarious, or bizarre shots of moms, with or without their children, from around the world, from the black-and-white era through today) and the unexpected (we guess “mummy” and “mommy” are easily confused…). And, like any search term whose primary reference is to Joan Crawford, there were also plenty of men in drag.
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It’s Kentucky Derby weekend and our money is on Homeboykris. Obviously. So for this week’s edition of Flickr Found Photo Fridays, it just seemed obvious to have a derby theme. After searching the annals of Flickr for “derby” photos, we found a surprising amount of rubber ducks, bunnies, trees, and some angry girls on skates. And very few horses. Not quite what we expected, but we’ll take it. Click through for the pictures and let us know what your gigantic derby hat looks like in comments.
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We are so excited to take the wild romp through 1986 that Hot Tub Time Machine promises to be. So excited, in fact, that we searched “time machine” for our latest edition of Flickr Found Photo Fridays. (We’d rather not know what “hot tub” turns up.) Although we found some obligatory photos of gears, cogs, and jumbled wires, we preferred the images that were a little less literal. Check them out after the jump and let us know if you plan on checking out the movie over the weekend.
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As we look out the window, New York is bleak and gray. The forecast for the weekend is rain, rain, and more rain. Sigh. In hopes of preempting the arrival of spring, we decided to look at pretty pictures of plants in bloom and baby animals on Flickr — but when we searched the term, tulips, sunshine, and lambs weren’t exactly what we found. Check out the pictures that took us by surprise in our latest edition of Found Photo Fridays after the jump.
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This month has brought a lot of snow to the Northeast. We’ve seen fine snow. We’ve seen chunks of snow. We’ve seen mushy snow. We’ve even seen sideways snow. And this installment of Found Photo Fridays comes bearing even more of the stuff. After the jump, cozy up with some our favorite Flickr-provided photos of snow and experience all of the pretty, none of the frostbite.
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It’s Mardi Gras! In the Christian tradition, this is the last night of splurging before the ritual fasting of the Lenten season begins tomorrow on Ash Wednesday. Assuming that you won’t be able to make it down to Bourbon Street to celebrate, we’ve rounded up some photos from festivities around the world. Be warned: This isn’t your typical drunk girl flashing their boobs for beads fare — some of it’s a lot more shocking than that.
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