Bildfähig!

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Two recent blogposts deal with pictures on flickr showing the contents of bags. On Core 77 hipstomp writes that looking at these pictures on flickr is an efficient way for a designer to know more about the uses of laptop bags and “see what people carried in theirs” and concludes: “ID Ethnographers need look no further than Flickr”. In his comment to this Steve Portigal has rejected the claim of innovation for this by reminding us that flickr is already four years old and also correctly demands to use the term ethnography only if it is appropriate.

But there is more to add: These pictures are not only documents just about how many objects and what people put in their laptop bags. Simply looking at these pictures without further consideration of their status as images will not do the job, if the goal is the efficient use of image archives such as flickr or YouTube by any designer or company trying to adjust to customer’s needs. A deeper analysis will have to ask why these picture look like they do and why they are shared on flickr.

In his book Patterns of Intention Michael Baxandall states that one can explain a picture by defining it as a visual complex that has a specific visual surface accessible to close verbal description, solves a given problem, and draws from specific cultural resources to do that (p. 18). What can we say about the bag pictures under these premises? These pictures are based on the assumption that the frame fixed by the camera has been a real scene and represents accurately, how a group of objects looked like at a certain point in time; that’s the problem they solve: they are archival images. The result are photographs with a plain view from above on the objects and the bag itself avoiding more complex spatial photographic description.

Even though we don’t know what Talbot would have thought about the relationship between photography and handbags, we know for sure that he has advertised with a photograph depicting “Articles of China” in 1844 in The Pencil of Nature (Plate III) this use of photography for archival purposes. Pictures following Talbot’s picture are not made with any interest in beautiful composition, but meant to inform us about which objects were present somewhere at a specific time and place.

But what about the pictures on  flickr? Firstly, they respond to the desire to look into something that in most cases is hidden. Secondly, we seem to believe that we can draw conclusions from the objects in the pictures both about the bag’s owner and his current way of life and profession. These pictures are therefore a proof of our ability in doing this kind of reading from a group of objects to the person who supposedly owns them. We do this based on the additional belief that such a bag includes only objects somebody really needs during the day,  i.e. we understand them to be objects of ‚existential’ value and ‚true’ significance for the owner.

The fact that these pictures are shared and put in relation on a website flickr adds to this the fact that people seem to be eager to compare and reflect on the group of objects they carry around in their bags. Therefore, they start to use this pictures as portraits that don’t show their face but objects they own and use.

Picture source: Manu Contreras. Que es lo que llevo en mi mochila (version verano). 2005. (used under creative commons license)

References:

Baxandall, Michael. Patterns of Intention. On the Historical Explanation of Pictures. New Haven, 1985. here.

More about Michael Baxandall in the New York Times Obituary, here.

More pictures of bags, here.

More about Henry Fox Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, see Plate III, here.

More English posts: here.