The Flickr Aesthetic

aka gatekeeping as tastemaking

Sometimes Flickr users joke that the most ‘interesting’ photo ever would feature:

• a baby with big blue eyes
• a sunrise and a sunset
• female nudity
• highly saturated colours
• shallow depth-of-field
• hard focus

I even started putting together a gallery of images that exemplify this aesthetic.

Now I’m not saying that all photos on Flickr are like this but I am saying it’s the dominant aesthetic and it’s the one that newcomers are strongly encouraged to follow.

New users are shown a homepage that promotes certain kinds of photos and certain kinds of photographers. Compare: http://www.flickr.com/explore to http://500px.com/flow and it’s clear that users are being nudged in different directions on the two sites. Or compare it to the Medium Style Sheet which says that it doesn’t want to impose rules but clearly does nudge users towards certain aesthetic decisions. For instance it asks people to use American spellings even though where I’m from we spell colour “colour.”

Every site does this to some extent. They all have a tone or aesthetic that they want to encourage. Flickr is unique in saying that certain (hidden) factors which they control make 1 photo more ‘interesting’ than another.

I don’t know if Flickr’s founders created its aesthetic or just magnified one of the creative strands in their community. I do know that those who aren’t in the mainstream of the Flickr aesthetic just have to live with the idea that our work is officially less ‘interesting.’

The downside for the site is that they’ve effectively alienated every creative person who doesn’t subscribe to that dominant aesthetic.