Flickr Photographers and the History of Art

Cross the phenomenal growth of digital photography with the Web's powers of storage, indexing, and dissemination, and you get photosharing sites like Flickr, Imageshack, and Photobucket. Originally conceived as digital warehouses where anyone with a digital camera or scanner could store their photos and friends and family could access them, these sites, with Flickr in the lead, have added the capacities to attach comments and indexing tags to photos and to form Groups where members can find and comment on the work of other, like-minded individuals (and put up relevant work of their own). In Here Comes Everybody (2008), Clay Shirky discusses Flickr as one of the new "social tools" on the Web that are transforming culture from a filter-then-publish model to a publish-then-filter model of art and information. He does not have much to say about how the new, amateurized filtering works on Flickr beyond noting that thousands of Groups have organized themselves on Flickr in just a few years for the purposes of “exploring and perfecting certain kinds of photos: landscape and portraiture, of course, but also photos featuring the color red, or those composed of a square photo perfectly framing a circle, or photos of tiny animals clinging to human fingers (101).” This suggests a disquieting fragmentation and dispersion of perfections according to subjects, a shattering of ton kalon into myriad specialized beauties. Not all of these Groups are in fact communities of practice (some are mutual admiration societies) nor are they wholly new: they provide some of the critical functions of traditional photography clubs, as described for example in Bourdieu's Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste and Photography: A Middle-brow Art. Some Groups provide places to exchange mainly technical data and talk; others (1344, at the time of writing) support their members' aspirations to show their work and have it viewed and critiqued as art. This number is so large that it too is in need of filtering and consolidation, and it does not include any of the practical critiquing that goes on in the comments and annotations to photos everywhere on Flickr.

Perhaps we should concentrate on Groups with a common keyword. The keyword art can be used to search for Groups: it turns out that there over 56,000 Groups with art in their titles. As a keyword, artistic is more selective; it occurs in the names of only 5000 Groups. Of course, adding an "art" tag to one's photo or posting it to a few of those 56,000 groups will not in itself secure aesthetic attentiveness for one's photo or establish a reputation as an artist, at least not among those of taste and discernment. Adding flowers to art as search terms will narrow the number of Groups to 15,455, among which is one Group (The Art of Out of Focus Flowers) with clear instructions for making art: "The Art of Out of Focus Flowers is about intentionally minimising the amount of a flower in focus so as to create a work of art. Photos should have less than 10% of the area in focus." Add cat to art and we are down to just over 4400 groups including Cat Art, Art Cats, and the defiantly named (C)a(R)t - Cat Photos CAN be art! The proof is in the 631 photos found there. Clearly, unless the new information technology of tags, folksonomies, and indexing has some understanding of art to guide it, it will not lead to those photos that do repay aesthetic attention. This sort of frontal attack will not work; a bit more subtlety is required.

The very word art is part of the problem, thinking of it as a set of valued objects, perhaps even a hierarchically ranked set. Considered as a practical question for a Flickr photographer, the question is how to get some people to look view your photo(s) in the slower and more thoughtful way that we have learned to grant various images that are reserved for contemplation and found in books, museums, galleries, and a few other public spaces. Artists claim their identities as artists by aligning themselves in relation to some part of the body of objects that in their time exemplify art and are held to reward esthetic contemplation. Bourdieu succinctly lays out this positioning in terms that apply to Flickr photographers as well as academcians:

the 'naive' spectator cannot attain a specific grasp of works of art which only have meaning—or value—in relation to the specific history of an artistic tradition. The aesthetic disposition demanded by the products of a highly autonomous field of production is inseparable from a specific cultural competence. This historical culture functions as a principle of pertinence which enables one to identify among the elements offered to the gaze, all the distinctive features and only these, by referring them, consciously or unconsciously, to the universe of possible alternatives. (Distinction, p. 4)

He likens this ability to recognise a style, which is acquired by familiarity with works of art, to the ability to recognise familiar faces in that we may not be able to give a clear and distinct list of features that constitute the style. To be art, art must imitate art. This principle is particularly important for photography, which is most commonly regarded as a technology for recording and commemorating significant experiences in life. Works of art link to other works of art in an "interminable circuit [circulation circulaire] of interlegitimation" (p.53). He notes in Photography: A Middle-brow Art that photography has no comparable body of recognised exemplary models (i.e., Masterpieces) and this lack is one reason it has trouble establishing a claim to high art.

In the 1970s and in reaction to conceptual art, a number of photographers led by Jeff Wall, Joel Peter Witkin, Victor Burgin, Cindy Sherman, and Yasumasa Morimura began to "remake" Masterpieces by setting them as tableaux vivantes and photographing them, thus aligning their work in their various ways to paintings in the canon of Western art (and Hokusai, as an honorary). More recently, visiting the masterpieces has been continued by Geoffrey Crewdson and most spectacularly by Tom Hunter, who enjoys the full sponsorship of the Tate and the National Gallery and the approbation of critics in his program of bringing Vermeer, Millais, Piero della Francesca, Poussin, and others to daily life in the London borough of Hackney. For example, in her survey of 2004 The Photograph as Contemporary Art, Charlotte Cotton says, generalizing over Hunter's citings of classic paintings,

When historical visual motifs are used in a contemporary photographic subject in this way, they act as a confirmation that contemporary life carries a degree of symbolism and cultural preoccupation parallel with other times in history, and art's position of being a chronicler of contemporary fables is asserted (55).

In short, Hunter's resettings make life in Hackney more meaningful and they make Art more relevant. It is not my intention to engage in critique of Hunter's work (some of which I think is very good) since he is about as well served by the institutional art establishment as a young professional artist can be, but to examine how a number of mostly non-professional photographers organize themselves around linking their work to paintings from the past and in so doing secure for their work that second, longer, reflective look that is the aesthetic gaze. This is the focal question of this essay.

We know of the work of Wall, Witkin, and the others because they succeeded in gaining recognition in the instutionalized world of professional art: they took art degrees, exhibited, won prizes and grants, found gallery dealers and curators, sponsors, and eventually publishers and critics. This process can be spoken of as filtration or even exclusion, with the others—the less successful ones—being filtered out and their work never becoming widely known, but it could also be regarded as one of concentration (or aggregation, a currently popular word). Shirky speaks of the amateurization of information which produces Wikipedia in the same terms of filtration, but analogy breaks down at the point of editing and selection, for there is little in art to conform the members and Groups into a consensus in taste or value. Rather, at the scale that Flickr functions, a huge proliferation of Groups occurs, some micro-specialized and others monstrously huge, diffuse, and overlapping. If we want to look at how Flickr photographers are aligning themselves to the institutional tradition of Fine Art, there is no single place or Group to go to, but rather a multitude of threads that can be gathered to weave such an account. With Flickr it is easy to generate a huge number of statistics, but my concern is less with describing the behavior of linking (who links? to whom do they link?) than with finding insightful and revealing links that make some Flickr photographs worth a look.

Beginning with a couple of programmatic statements by Flickrites themselves, I will discuss how aspiring Flickr artists handle four challenges posed by linking a photo to a classical painting:

1. remediating the painting (or sculpture) in chemical/digital media,
2. differentiating homages to nudes from ever ubiquitous webporn,
3. presenting and framing the photo without "telling" too much,
4. making visible both the source and the “homage.”

The discussion will necessarily be restricted to a few Masters and Masterpieces and, where possible, I will compare different homages to the same source. The first section (remediation) will concentrate on homages to paintings by Van Gogh and Degas and the renewed struggle between Pictorialism and "pure photography." The second section (nudes v. porn) will focus on naked sleeping women (and one man) found in paintings by Wyeth, Gauguin, and Courbet, and the sculpture of Canova. The third section (presentation) again focuses very narrowly on Van Gogh, this time his(?) boots. The fourth section (co-presence) takes up paintings by Munch, Balthus, and Hopper, the last expanding into a more extensive examination of a renewed, internationalized Hopper tradition which is largely the work of the Web.

Whether or not they have read Bourdieu or are familiar with the work of the 70s and 80s art photographers, certain aspiring Flickr photographers have called for such linkages. Lloyd Spencer, for one, (Flickr name: Brigatte.com) appends this statement by the photographer Robert Adams as an epigraph to his "About" page on Flickr:

YOUR OWN photography is never enough. Every photographer who has lasted has depended on other people's pictures too---photographs that may be public or private, serious or funny, but that carry with them a reminder of community.

Brigatte.com/Spencer devotes his energies to building such a community—or communities—on Flickr; he is a member of too many groups to count, has posted about 5000 photos, is an indefatigible commenter, and the administrator of the group Old Masters (photos inspired by painting and painters). In his daytime job, he is Associate Principal Lecturer in Media at Leeds Trinity University and has published on Hegel, the Enlightenment, Benjamin, and postmodernism.

chimichagua (no daytime name) is a Columbian (with a foot in Los Angeles). He has many Group memberships on Flickr. On his site one finds a set of photos called "Imaginary Museum" which begins with an epigraph, this one from Gilles Deleuze's essay "Mediators"

Whether they're real
or imaginary,
animate or inanimate,

one must form one's mediators.

It's a series: If you don't belong to a series,

even
a completely imaginary one,

you're lost.

I need my mediators to express myself,

and they'd never express themselves without me:

one is always working in a group,

even when it doesn't appear to be the case.(verse-lineation by chimichagua)

His "Imaginary Museum" contains reproductions of works, mostly paintings, that are for him mediators. His tastes range widely: they include a core of the "History of Art" canon with many fine twentieth century additions (David Hockney, Gerhard Richter, Frida Kahlo, Max Ernst, a series on sexual pleasuring, and several with a more particular Columbian bearing). The images are grouped into sequences according to contents, shapes, and poses. His own collection of 1200 plus photos also ranges, and at times one can see a particular precedent, though I have yet to see the influence (or mediation) of Da Vinci's “Coition of a Hemisected Man and Woman” in his own photos.

Brigatte.com and chimichagua are advocating what used to be called tradition, though they are very careful to allow wide scope for choosing one's tradition and they are not as strongly anchored in history as Bourdieu's intervalidating body of art. None of these writers give pointers or examples of how to link successfully. And there is plenty of linkage offering various degrees of illumination, even if we exclude photos made to fulfill a common photography class assignment: “Recreate a work of art as a photograph.”

When a photographer tags or titles a photograph as a link to a painting, or more broadly, the style of a master, the term most often used on Flickr is hom(m)age, although tribute to, after, inspired by, ode to and the least committal reminiscent of also occur. The term remake is very rare. In most cases, the link specifies a named painting by a master (or the name is supplied in a comment). Links to works in the general "style of" painters are not common. There are also Groups of homage to certain auteur photographers (e.g., Ansel Adams, Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Man Ray, August Sander, Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, Andreas Gursky, David Hockney, Brassai, Paul Strand, Ernst Haas, Bernt and Hilda Becher, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Mary Ellen Mark); these have some special issues (e.g., color v. bw, documentary v. photojournalism, captures v. posed, straight v. manipulated, photomontage) and are another, large topic for another day.

1. remediation
Almost any painting, and certainly any Impressionist or Post-Impressionist one, makes one aware of the constraints imposed by the photographic process. In photography, controlling light and shadow is a constant problem, but Van Gogh can decide to eliminate shadows cast by objects when he paints his bedroom. Focus must be carefully controlled and still there is often too much detail. The camera allows no fudging of its version of single vanishing point perspective. And so on. But add digital post-processing (aka Photoshop) and much of the image-making constraints of photography fall away. Photographers are far more able to emulate painterly effects, if that is what they want to do. But should it be? Is not the challenge of remediation to render a painting (or sculpture) in another distinct medium, rather than to show the the new medium can be manipulated to produce a look like that of the painted source? The question has been debated for the better part of two centuries. Rather than join the debate directly, I will offer a few case studies of painting only with light.

Various combinations of the search terms vincent, sunflowers, and van gogh net over 1000 photos. Some of these are reproductions of his various canvases portraying sunflowers, but that still leaves hundreds of sunflower photographs invoking Vincent's name. Fortunately, there is a Group called In the footsteps of Vincent van Gogh where eight of the 34 photos posted are of sunflowers. Vincent's sunflower paintings—any of them—pose a major challenge to the photographer, namely, what to do about their heavy texturing, which scarcely appears in cheaper photo-offset prints. For Terri Bell, they offer an opportunity to use postprocessing filters like "Oilify" or "Impressionist" that lay brush strokes over the photo:

This photo links by the “inspired by” pointer, which suggests considerable independence of the photo from the “source.” Two of the commentors exclaim that Vincent would be happy and proud of this image. Another comment, this by Steve Bailey, is perhaps edged with irony: “Ah - all very clever, and in a fraction of the time that it took to knock up the original!” The question thus arises: is it inspired, and if so, by a particular painting? Does it provide an interesting perspective on the source, whether it is a single canvas or a slightly more abstract Van-Gogh-Sunflower-Style? (There is one Van Gogh in the series with five sunflowers, but it is quite different.) Before trying to answer that, consider another homage that does not attempt to replicate the look of the palette knife impasto:

A photograph in hard focus will give a great deal more surface detail than one finds in most paintings. Barberis' photo does not back away from hard focus, even when doing homage to Van Gogh's sunflowers, and in fact he adds to the play of light by replacing the earthen vase with the cut glass one. This vase introduces a note of elegance and precision that plays off against the scruffy, exuberant vulgarity of the sunflowers and expands the palette of the painting with the blue window light, which does cool off an otherwise very warm painting. However, in his image as in Van Gogh's probable source, (and not in most of the dozens of other homages to Van Gogh's Sunflowers on Flickr), several of the flowers are slipping past prime and beginning to wither. Two petals have fallen. Their bloom is at once brash and fleeting, their imperfection part of their brilliant display. Barberis' photo helps me see this theme in Van Gogh's painting and it is for him the proper object of homage, not the general conception or the textures laid on with the palette knife.

This choice between homages raises the long and much vexed debate between pictorialists and “straight” photographers as to the artistic use of the medium. As long as the enthusiasm for Impressionism was very strong—and Bourdieu noted that its “simultaneously lyrical and naturalistic adherence to natural or human nature” still has great appeal for the bourgeosie—photography seems to clutter the design with excessive detail, to show too much. In his influential Naturalistic Photography for Students of Art (1889), Peter Henry Emerson inveighed against having everything in a photo in sharp focus:

this “sharp” ideal is the childish view taken of nature by the uneducated in art matters, and they call their productions true, whereas they are just about as artistically false as can be (151-52).

When it is a matter of art, not science, he argues for having only the principal target of attention in fairly sharp focus, and even then no sharper than the eye sees it. Emerson's chapter on Focussing offers canny advice on the use of depth of field (as we call it), but the impact of his work on the emerging school of Pictorialism seems to have been to help identify “artistic” with “fuzzy.”

Pictorialism, which became the dominant fashion in photography in the early decades of the twentieth-century, developed quite an array of blur and soft focus exposure and special printing techniques that reduce distracting detail. Soft focus has long been associated with memories and reverie. It was also felt to be a more discreet and sublimated way of depicting the naked human form, including children (and has been revived for that purpose in some of Sally Mann's work). Eventually Pictorialism gave way to “pure” photography, f/64 hard focus and full tonal scale in printing. But in recent decades soft focus and blur have been embraced by Gerhard Richter in his paintings made from photographs, perhaps most famously in October 18, 1977, his fifteen paintings of the dead bodies of Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, and Gudrun Esslin of the Red Army Faction. (The photos he worked from were television and the newspapers and thus already somewhat blurred.) The painting of Meinhof's body has become the object of a photographic homage (albeit a grimly ironic one: the homage is a self-portrait, like Hippolyte Bayard's famous first photographic fake—Self-Portrait as a Drowned Man (1840), hence it too is a fake). The intention of the "homage" may have been to desacralize the Richter source as a focus of grieving, since the comments on it on Flickr identify the original and then proceed to a lively discussion of how well the homage would work as a album cover, and for which album and group. It seems in this particular case that ideological antagonisms are still swirling in the blur.

Deliberate blurring of normally sharply focused scenes has been employed by Thomas Ruff to turn pornography into art, and these photos have been successfully exhibited as such (not without certain perplexities and reservations). Some Flickr exhibitors have made sharp focus, straight on portraits linked to Ruff's, but I have yet to see any homages to his reworked porn. It is possible to take Ruff's use of the blur=art association as richly ironic ('Ah, the power of a convention to produce instant sublimation'), except that his resulting images are often intriguing and disconcertingly beautiful. (There is a Group Porn Artworks [1796 items] with blur photos among many other things.) Ruff's work makes it very clear that digital photography and post-processing tools equal and surpass the power of the Pictorialist's special printing techniques for expressing mood and emotion, and hence that the technology is readily accessible to support a new wave of Pictorialism—one which seems to be building on Flickr. I will pick up this thread in the last section.

Returning to the Impressionists. Degas's nude bathers generally seem softened by a sort of bathroom steam; his ability to soften contour, shadow, and crease go far beyond "blur" and "soft focus" and is very notable in his pastels and oil paintings of dancers and the steam of his railroad stations. Hard-focus homages to Degas are uncommon and even more rarely popular. Here is a test case. Looking first at the source:

In the Degas, the woman's gaze is averted, turned inward, without hope or interest in her companion or surroundings, a sort of weary passivity easy to associate with absinthe. Indeed, she and her companion were for the Victorians the most fully realized image of Dissoluteness to be found in art. (Manet painted the same pair of actors in a similar but more upscale pose and setting two years later, but it is missing the lower class "degradation" of Degas' scene that so spoke to the moralists of that moralistic age.)

One can certainly see this as a contemporary Parisian cafe. The light is similarly directional, the man's long-stemmed pipe is a wonderful stroke of luck and of course one cannot expect hats in 2004. The central figures are in very hard focus (although the picture is also an almost textbook example of using depth of field to direct attention away from the background). In Hawks' contemporary scene, the woman is looking at the photographer and his camera resting on the table top with a touch of suspicion and disapproval, indicating that she does know she is about to become a capture. Drink is not in evidence, and Hawks tells us in his comment that they have just finished having espresso, whch perhaps helps to sharpen the focus, (though ironically the man in the Degas is also drinkiong coffee). Indeed, the photo might have been titled "L'Espresso" and everything would fall into place. It is a homage which makes as much, perhaps more, of its differences from its exemplar as its similarities.

So it would seem that one need not become a Pictorialist to connect in an interesting way to an Impressionist painting (although one certainly may). “Pure photography” succeeded in establishing hard-focus as both intrinsically photographic and artistic. Edward Weston, Ruth Bernhard, Imogen Cunningham, and Robert Mapplethorpe all showed that it can artistically render even the nude human figure. Hawks and barberis would be completely at home in an f/64 meeting. There are many wonderful uses of Photoshop filters and more waiting to be discovered; but when used to make a photo look more like a painting, they can have the effect of a shortcut or cheap trick.

A culminating case of the whirl of impressionism, remediation, and blur occurs via the sculptural remediations of J. Seward Johnson and others in the Grounds for Sculpture in the former state fair grounds in Hamilton, New Jersey. Johnson specializes in enamelled, cast metal and other tableaus of famous Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works—tableaus that you can walk through and around and photograph from any angle and time of day scenes you have only seen flat. At time of writing, there are ten videos on YouTube of such perambulations in the spaces of paintings available, of which this is one:

The only problem with such photographs is that the figures look like enamelled metal—much too shiny and sharp for Impressionist masterpieces. Fortunately, we have only to apply a filter and a few layers in Photoshop (a procedure called the Orton process, which combines a blurred and sharp version of the image):

In addition to blurring away fine surface detail, ortonizing tends to increase the saturation of colors and to make objects appear to glow with softness at the edges. There are parameters to tweak to get the "best looking" result and fiddling with these can be time consuming, but ortonizing is very easy as a way to get a quickie painting-look (you can do it on Picasa!), and that is a retreat from the challenge of remediation. I would not want to close the book on the Orton Effect, however, for three reasons: one is that my eyes at yet do not know how to view its products, and struggle to sharpen their focus, but perhaps some accommodation to this new look can be learned. Second, some ortonized photos are stunningly good on a computer screen, where the glow effect is heightened by translumience. Third, there do seem to be photos that need to be "aestheticized" so that they will not fall into the clutches of the pornographic gaze.

In the end, remediation is not a sufficient purpose in itself: replicating a painting photographically poses many technical and formal challenges, and meeting them can be instructive about the affordances of each medium, but the homage needs as well to make a different point. The wiser Flickr photographers know that.

2. nude homages and porn
One convention Flickr photographers hope to carry over from the tradition of fine art to Flickr is the distinction between a sublimated, not crudely sexual viewing of the unclothed human body (the "nude") and photos that are, even to the point of saying so, aids to masturbation or other lascivious acts. They choose to remediate paintings and sculptures of nudes without taking much caution from the fact that museums and galleries are not usually located next to Adult Book Stores and Peep Shows. Having struggled with the issue of censorship of sexually explicit photos, especially at the time of their merging into Yahoo!, Flickr has decided not to block many images that would be found in the XXX Book Store, not the gallery, though Flickr also houses many Groups which one must join to view, making sure, that is, that one knows what one is getting into when asking to be allowed to participate in that Group. There seems to be considerable cross traffic between Adult stores and galleries, which the less numerous group finds distressing and degrading.

Interestingly, some commenters on the Grounds sculptures say that coming upon Degas' seated bather toweling herself off by a stream stirs uncomfortable voyeuristic titillations in them. Even framed and hanging on a wall, some views and some postures are more problematic than others; the owners of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde for over a century kept it hidden in their homes. Now it is on open display in the Musée d'Orsay, where it challenges viewers (tourists all) to exercise their aesthetic cool. Flickr photographers are fond of photographing people viewing L'Origine. The example here is by agnieszka. (błaszczak).

Flickr photographers are drawn to female nudes in what John Berger calls the peculiarly Western recumbent posture. Indeed, the ones I will discuss here are also asleep or near sleep. By a curious coincidence (?), both porn and high art have categories for such figures: Sleeping Women in Art is a category in the now rapidly developing WikiCommons index (currently with 59 images) and Sleepy Girls is a XXX category for images of women ideally situated to be used for pleasure. The question facing the aspiring Flickr artist is how to keep the XXX-oriented viewers from leaving inappropriate comments (shall we say) or even worse, making one's artistic nude a Favorite in their collection of photos of gaping sphincters, spread labia, BJs, and penile penetrations. Flickr photographers frequentely tell such people to go away, and they may try to protect their homages by making them less sexually suggestive.

Flickr provides a great deal of information about its members' tastes.^[1] On Flickr, every member has a Favorites file where thumbnails of the images they have "faved" are displayed. This file reflects the interests and tastes of the member in the same way that prints and posters on the walls of one's dwelling do, and thus we can see the particular image in relation to a field of other things they also like in the eye of the faver. Are there homages to L'Origine on Flickr? Yes, a few, one with fifteen fave stars. And in this case, these faves lead, almost without exception, to collections of thumbnails of photos most would unhesitatingly call pornographic. (Photos of Courbet's original on Flickr do not attract many faves.) The other, much less faved photos deflect or attentuate the gaze from the anatomical center, but the popular one is what it is, bikini marks, trimmed hair, and all. Clearly it is not receiving a aesthetically contemplative gaze from the fifteen viewers who faved it. Flickr photographers study the faves of the favers to assess their taste and to guess what their photo looks like to the faver. Some even complain that their photo is attracting the wrong kind of interest. L'Origine is admittedly an extreme case: many have had difficulty according aesthetic regard to Courbet's original painting. Most of the nudes from the canon are more discreet than L'Origine, so perhaps a homage that is faithful to the original in not exposing more that catches the pornographic gaze will not end up with thumbnail links in collections of porn-oriented Favorite lists. I will consider three of Andrew Wyeth's "Helga" series, Night Shadows, Daydream, and Overflow , interspersed with homages to Gauguin's Manao Tupupau: The Spirit of the Dead Keep Watch and another Courbet, Le Sommeil.

Starting with a homage to Daydream, note that yes, out of faithfulness to its source, it is shot through mosquito netting and thus in softened focus:

Cory received 24 faves in the first month this was on line (Cory's photo of Wyeth's original has only two). Only a few of these run to the spread and masturbation photos; otherwise a number of different tastes are represented. It is worth mentioning that Cory includes this in a "classic painting challenge" set of photos which try "to recreate a few classic paintings." There are ten in all and most repay some study.

Quite a different fate attends this second example from Wyeth, despite presenting another nude sleeping in the daylight.

Wyeth's source, a watercolored drypoint, fills the background with deep shadow (chiaroscuro; several of the Helga paintings are lighted by late afternoon sunlight). In the Ode, the background is filled with brightly illuminated, lichen-spotted rock. This introduces a contrast of rock and flesh textures which is very common in “nude in nature” photos. Also, the dried stalks in the vicinity of her red hair set further contrasts of texture in play. Helga Testorf, Wyeth's neighbor and model, is known to have gone to sleep during some sittings and she seems to be asleep in Night Shadow. moonjazz's model does not seem to be asleep—some of the wrinkles around her eyes would have relaxed if she were—in fact, she seems to be posing, however briefly, on that piece of rock.

The Wyeth watercolor was photographed and posted to Flickr, where it was linked as a Favorite 26 times. In general, the Favorites files of these 26 fans are full of portraits, often drawn or painted. This is true also of another nude profile (Lovers) from the Helga series on Flickr. Moonjazz's homage has seven faves, but the Favorites file of these seven are strikingly different, running heavily to naked torsos and especially breasts and nipples—soft core, as they say, inclining to the “mature”, most indoors and quite artlessly depicted. Only one faver's collection has birds, kitties, and sunsets but no crotch shots. Given what moonjazz provides as an artistic credo, this would seem to be a disappointing failure to connect. Why does his act of homage fail to get views within the field of art? Wyeth's image is safely bracketed by the power of the artist's name and the surrounding pictures in the Helga series (itself the subject of an entire volume). moonjazz's homage is in fact a member of a Nudes in Nature photoset; in the other photos of the set, moonjazz tries many ways to make “artistic nudes” of “my muse”—soft focus, sepia toned, shot from the back, in the mountains, with water, in the forest, on a log, etc., but in this photo the hard focus, bright sunlight, frontal view, rock/straw textures, supine posture, and sweet dreams expression combine to break out of the art frame. The naturist screed doesn't help matters—a point to be addressed in the next section.

Another, somewhat perplexing case where a homage attracts a number of porn-collectors despite the intentions of its maker is this homage to Paul Gauguin's Manao Tupapau (The Spirit of the Dead Keeps Watch) [just added as a mediator by chimichagua, BTW]:

This is quite a lovely figure study in a pose very similar to Gauguin's, though in Gauguin, the girl's eyes are open. True, there is no Spirit of the Dead sitting by the bed, but there is a short lyric by Gerard Manset upon the subject of the painting that calls up a suitably mysterious, Tahitian dream for her. Terms used in the comments include beautiful, romantic, sexy, erotic, and sensual. "Sucky sucky, ten dalla" is one comment. No "sexual parts" are exposed, and yet of the 31 faves it received, there are five to porn-collections. One clue to these non-art reactions comes from a comment that the sheet yanked back at the top left corner of the bed and the box of tissue makes the picture even more erotic. And why not mention the lamp, the telephone, and the ashtray—all the appurtenances of a hotel room? Turned back or not, the sheets provide a huge amount of distracting, naturalizing detail. It is all too easy to imagine that this shot was not planned but is a capture. The top of the photo could be cropped and the sharp focus on the sheets softened some and it would perhaps be less attractive to the pornographer's eye. Colodio is interested in erotic depictions of women, but this one does not have an erotic tag and is shown in the Come together?! Group pool which mainly contains photos of couples.

In fact, colodio also posted a highly cropped version of just the lower half of her body and shifted to grayscale, and a Spanish poem substituted for the Manset lyric. This as also been quite popular, gathering 19 faves, of which only one is by a porn-collector. So the ratio is better. A different Flickrite (sokaris73) uses the title D'Aprés Paul Gauguin to post a scanned, magazine reproduction of another, far more accurate remaking of this tableau by the fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh using the supermodel Naomie Campbell as a model. But still no spirit of the dead. As is usual with fashion remakes, the point of this one seems to be to display the ability of photographer and model to give you any look you want ("you" being the customer). But Lindbergh's treatment does suggest how to deal with the wrinkles in the sheets—white 'em out! Ortonizing works well here also.

In yet another setting of this tableau, Tom Hunter shows how adding just a rat in the bed turns it into a sordid scene from Living in Hell.

One of the benefits of the privileged space of art is that it includes representations of desire that exceeds or transgresses conventional gender roles, and Flickr photographers have claimed that privilege also by way of homage. Haraldamsterdam - censored (Harald Seiwert) has made a set of 83 "inspired by's," most of which have sources from the archive of art history, specifically nude or partially nude women who are recast as men, usually one or two of Harald's many, many friends. Here is his homage to Wyeth's Overflow, a painting very similar to Daydream:

This, like most of haraldamsterdam's "inspired by's," is remarkably accurate in pose, composition, and light; from close comparison to the source, small differences emerge. Harald's figure, though slightly more modestly draped, is not asleep, but looks back at us with a challenging gaze somewhat like Manet's Olympia and not like Wyeth's sleeping figure. The gaze increases the erotic charge and shifts the ground with the viewer, but the total effects are not greatly divergent—not so divergent as one might expect, given the attention Wyeth devotes to Helga's breasts and braids.

Haraldamsterdam's homage has received 5 faves in its first ten months on line, and, while most of these favers have a marked taste for the naked male torso (or torsos generally), they stay within the same guidelines haraldamsterdam does here. He acknowledges that he does have XXX photographs, but you have to have listed him as a Friend to see them.

Haraldamsterdam has another sleeping nude among his inspireds which runs a greater risk of addition to porn collections, namely his remediation of Canova's The Sleeping Nymph sculpture:

The angle of the shot gives a back exposure very similar to Manao Tupupau (but with the left leg crossed behind the right, not the reverse). The photo is finished in grayscale with some blurring, perhaps to emulate a marble sheen, but these are also two ways to say "this is art" and to reduce its appeal to the porn collectors, and the background has been removed, removing any such cues to narrativization. Nonetheless, of the five faves this has received, the collections run to bears, bondage, and the male member. That's all it takes to be a bear? a little hair on the thighs? It must be the angle of the shot, which is certainly not the one taken in the standard reproductions of the statue. And in fact the Victoria and Albert Museum seems to have caught on, and now displays the statue with a screen behind it (see above), making it hard to view or take (a photo of) "her" from the rear.

The last example of sleepy nudes is perhaps the hardest to predict in that it was a companion piece to L'Origine that Courbet painted for Khalil Bey, the Turkish ambassador, and kept in similar seclusion. When the ambassador's fortunes declined and his art collection was put up for sale, it was seen in a gallery window by a woman who promptly wrote to the Paris police denouncing Courbet for immorality. This is the famous Le Sommeil:

The redheaded model is Jo Heffernan, Whistler's mistress and model and Courbet's favorite model at the time.

This tones down Courbet's bravura canvas in a number of ways, first being the sepia toning, second the half-clothed and less tangled bodies, and third, the absence of portentous signs like the string of broken pearls and the pink gash in the bedding. It does not give us a scene immediately following a bout of voluptuous indulgence but one of a woman lying sleeping on the breast of her lover whose eyes are open and anything but oblivious—watchful and protective, rather (or listening to the shutter timer). I don't know about the ring on the sleeper's left hand; this is Santiago. It is remarkably touching, very different from its source. It has gathered 37 faves in its first nine months and been added to a few porn collections, but not many. Perhaps more remarkably, only a couple of the favers have other photos of women in loving embrace.

Haraldamsterdam has been here too with the ⚣ version (http://www.flickr.com/photos/haraldamsterdam/1484310986/in/set-72157602254172264/); it does another very exactly matched version in pose and decor in order to focus on the project of cross-undressing the Classics. Mainly the baldness of one sleeper points out how fond Courbet was of copious curly tresses.

Examples and contrasts such as these could be multiplied many times over, but we have perhaps seen enough to grasp the general point that the population of gynoscopically fixated are well represented on Flickr, and that when they see the naked body part that they are fixated on, they will link the photo giving them this view, paying little attention to what else might be going on. Further, anything suggesting the sexual availability of the model—starting with prone position and regardless of gender—will find favers to add it to their collection of hotties. Closeness of the camera to the naked subject is another factor: beyond portrait distance, the porn appeal falls off sharply. The relative immunity of the sources to porn appropriation is remarkable and might be attributed to some sort of High Art aura, but of course they are paintings (or dry point prints) and lack the sharp focus that we associate with decent quality porn, which is a clarity and proximity that implies access. Histeria Sweet's photo is quite sharply focused, but is not in color and so resists appropriation that way. This simply seems to be the way Flickr works at present: a full color, sharp focused, reasonably large photo of a recumbant naked body will be faved for some porn collections. This is one limit to the photographer's art as practice on Flickr.

3. presentation and artistic reserve
It is probably the case, however, that differences in reception of the two homages to Wyeth can also be traced in part to their different presentations on Flickr. When one locates an image via tags and indexing, the image appears without much attendant awareness of the contexts presented by the Flickr member's site. It has a location in the member's photostream, and thumbnails of the preceding and following photos are also displayed. The photostream may also be displayed in slideshow mode or as grids of thumbnails. But it may also be a member of a "set" defined by the photographer according to topic, model, treatment, etc., in which case it is displayed in relation to the other members of the set. Thus "Nudes in Nature" is a set defined by moonjazz for a group of his photos. It is a generally recognised subgenre and one that many photographers have contributed to over the years; using the phrase as a search term in Flickr gets over 1200 photos with those tags. In fact, these tags turn up 1688 Groups. moonjazz gave the photo to 23 public Groups, eight of them with the term art in their name. But it seems only one faver was buying it. One might hope that a title "Ode to ..." or a repeat of the famous source's title would definitively set the relevant context for viewing one's homage, but it would seem that titles are only one kind of contextualization cue and can be overridden by others.

Other major resources for controlling the context of a photo are the verbal ones of caption and comment, and here again moonjazz does his artistic intentions no good attmpting to fuse Wyeth's artistic vision with his own version of naturism. The point and aptness of a homage must be apparent—they cannot be argued for. Flickr gives photographers several chances to talk about the photo and thereby puts them in peril of talking too much. To the degree that the modernist canon favoring the open work over the closed one still applies, artists learn to take care to respect the mystery of the meaning of what they have done.

That being said, we should also note that one of the charms of Flickr is that it positions the viewer not in a gallery viewing photos hung on a white wall but in the photographer's studio, as if some friends of the photographer are sitting around discussing this piece of new work. Sometimes even the model comments on the photo. hollyjsch (Holly Schumacher) is a friend of Cory's, a Flickr photographer, and the model in two of Cory's classic painting challenge set, including Daydream. She apologizes for not having turned her head quite enough to have nailed the pose, and Cory responds that he likes it that you can see her face. (So do I, for what it's worth). The model speaks? If she speaks, anyone can! And too it is quite ok on Flickr to attach a comment asking the photographer if they had a particular image in mind and to receive, usually very quickly, an answer discussing the idea.

Here is another case of comparison in which artist-talk figures prominently:

The title is a simple "homage" link to the most famous of Van Gogh's paintings of work shoes and boots. The composition is stunningly good and emphasizes that the boots are opened and propped up to dry in the sun—they are working boots. In addition, it has the special unposed look of a capture, or "find" as the commenter with_regards (Ian Grivois) calls it, requesting that she add this photo to the group he founded and administers (looks like Art (homage)). Grivois has a good eye (and an art degree) and very actively recruits images for his group. His 39 piece set "Enjoying art" is a very rich group of his own museum photographs—Canada's answer to Thomas Struth. His invitation to add the photo to looks like Art (homage) should have proved a real boost, but the photo has remained largely unvisited except by those with an interest in things Latvian (it is in a small set "Latvia 2005").

This second one, by now_picnic (Kathy), comes with a brief tribute to the boots' place in her memories. Such biographical specificity and personal motivation usually close off aesthetic contemplation, which depends on some detachment of the object from the routines of practical action and the possibility of several connections and significances. But her comment continues: "They reminded me [that is to say, they seemed to signify more than purely personal meanings] of Van Gogh's boots in that painting." (You know, that painting.) This link takes you to a reproduction of the Van Gogh boots (as you expected), but it is embedded in an online excerpt from Fredric Jameson's The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism which discusses Heidegger's treatment of the painting and how it comes to mean. This is an invitation both intervisual and intertextual to contemplation and a rather extreme example of how linking to exemplars can work,^[2] since Jameson uses the painting of the boots to initiate a sweeping claims about how representations of concrete objects become meaningful in modernism and postmodernism. And Jameson's discussion becomes a nexus in an even larger debate including Meyer Shapiro and Jacques Derrida which reaches down to whose boots they are and whether it is vital to decide that. Actually, her link to Jameson (if followed) seems to embark on a detour down a ramifying path of textuality and away from her own position, which seems closest to Meyer Shapiro's famous argument that the boots are Vincent's own walking boots (she calls them "Van Gogh's boots"). Thus her personal attachment to her boots and their veneration in this photo are enlarged as they join with Vincent's presumed veneration of his boots in the painting. Such is her hope.

A strict formalist might argue that the connection depends too much on the backstory and illustrates the sort of slide that begins when you allow backstories, even perhaps stories as apparently innocuous as saulesmeit's. Such an exclusion is too rigorous: paintings are usually exhibited with identifying and explanatory text, whether placed in proximity to the painting or recorded in interpretive messages. Why should information about the context be denied photography? The problem with now_picnic's photo of her boots is that it doesn't resonate with Van Gogh's painting: the boots are nicely lighted and in focus, but the background, the bokeh, is excessively lighted, the off-center placement of the books says little, and the signs of wear on the flooring also take us in no particular direction. It ends up looking like a quickie.

These Van Gogh homages are peripheral to saulesmeit's and now_picnic's main interests in photography. Saulesmeit's favorite subjects are animals, especially pandas, and now_picnic mainly documents vacations. Neither seems at all concerned with making art and gaining reputation as artists on Flickr. But what they saw when they made these photos—what they recognised—was a particular work in the canon which made their photos meaningful to them. If Kathy had minded her reflections a little better and been a little less chatty, her photo might have looked a little more like art to us. Most Flickr photographers have not taken a course in writing artists' statements in art school and they do not have professional presenters of art to write or edit their copy. It remains to be seen whether a stable decorum of presentation will emerge on Flickr.

4. from links to co-presence
In its nature, a homage is secondary to the source and takes the meaning of the source as the point of departure for its own. The source image may be presumed familiar, or it may be hinted at (e.g., artist's name, but not the painting). Sometimes a hint fails: .bijou (Alana Celii) put up a photo of a boy in briefs with the title "Homage to The Bather" and a tag "paul cezanne." This photo has been up on Flickr for going on three years; it has received 127 faves and 12 comments, but no one says anything about Cezanne's painting: the photo reminds them of the film character Gummo, despite reproducing the pose of the Cezanne very closely. I suspect the viewers did not even see the tag and did not know they were looking at a homage to Cezanne's painting.

Identifying the source can easily turn into a one-upping game. "Remember/find the source" can be a tease, as it is in the remake/parody paintings of John Currin, or in this caption to a Homage to Painter Eric Fischl:

This shot reminds me of the drama in an Eric Fischl painting for some reason. It crosses the line from merely shooting what's around and gets into composing the shot with a psychological intent and letting the viewer read that intent as they may.

This is by fashion and celeb photographer Christopher Peterson and is sweetly disingenuous. The early painting Bad Boy (1981) is quite well-known, so much so as to have made it into chimichagua's set of Mediators.

Quite often the photographer will supply a link to the source, or will actually include a view of it in the comments. The need for a link in the case of an obscure source is generally recognised, but what about the "somewhat known"? Of the cases we have examined so far, the sunflowers and boots are well-known, though not without a certain slipperiness, and L'Absinthe is very-well-known. Andrew Wyeth falls in the somewhat known category, and Cory does well to make a copy for us of the source. Providing a specific source (and link) is yet another thing moonjazz might have done to indicate his serious intention that we see Night Shadow when we look at his photo. The danger of a vague gesture toward the source is that the source will be given a vague glance, or none at all.

Even good linking practice may not tether a homage to its source very closely. If the source image is to some degree enigmatic, its homages may go in divergent directions. I will illustrate this point with some photos by Jeff Wall that are based on source paintings and that become the source for homages on Flickr. Some of Jeff Wall's most famous photos (e.g., Picture for Women and The Destroyed Room) have been the sources of homages that did not understand the relation of the Wall photos to their sources in Manet's The Bar at the Folies-Bergères and Delacroix's The Death of Sardanapalus. In the case of the Room, there are several photos linked to the Wall source which are simply piles of junk and domestic debris in an alley or lot. These photographers have not looked at their source, and its source, very thoughtfully. Sometimes it is perhaps not understanding that is lacking, but sympathy. João Araujo makes an absolute hash of Wall's Picture for Women—a man, a woman, a camera, and a mirror and bingo!, you've got your homage (and four faves, all to pornish sites). Here are a couple of others, not quite so completely travesties: supa:dupa:fly's Tableau Photography (Response to Jeff Wall's - 'Picture for Women' 1979) and Christian Lapid's response to a school project to "appropriate an artist": Union. To be sure, when you have linked to Wall's Picture, you have linked to a somewhat enigmatic cinematographic moment in an unknown film related in many unspecified ways to Manet's classic canvas. Even the title is more hint that definite placement of the photo. Wall has explained in interviews that he intended the photo to be a reworking of the sexual politics of representation, Araujo patently "restores" the photographer and his tool of power to a near godlike power before which the poor naked girl can only cringe! (Another of his "homenagem" also pursues patriarchial revanchism.) It is clear from interviews and critical commentary that Wall intends for his photos to be viewed in relation to art history, and making the sources of his photos visible when his remakes are viewed might have helped point toward his intentions (except in Araujo's case), though he cannot ultimately control the way art history is read.

Edvard Munch's The Girls on the Pier is much better known in Norway than in the USA: four different Norwegian photographers have posted photos of that pier that refer to the girls and the Munch painting, one by the emptiness of the pier today, one by showing two girls in shorts standing where Munch's three (or four—multiple candidates for source again), one by a split frame of contemporary aerial view on left and painting on right, and one which is easier shown than described:

This is a form of co-presence which not only makes present the source image but uses it to explain why the shot was taken. One commenter queried whether the shot was a capture, but larskflem replies that she is his girl and he posed her there—so it is a deliberate attempt to reset the scene from a little over a century ago. The present day girl and pier/bridge are part of the blurred background, so that the Munch source receives the focus. Yet the true source is not the focus, but the reproduction of and commentary on the source, the painting having become definitive of this place a century later: this is the bridge and Agnete is the girl, as life somehow keeps stumbling on imitating art.

Balthus (Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola) and his work is not much represented in HA survey books, even surveys of twentieth-century painting, partly because many of his paintings involve sexually provocative young girls in tense drawingroom settings. They are cinematographic in Jeff Wall's sense, insofar as the scenes seem moments from highly wrought dramas of which we know nothing. Although his work is imitated on Flickr, one hesitates to call many of them homages, since they either exploit it (see Donald McPherson's remakes for TATLER Magazine featuring supermodel Katsia Damankova) or, if female, they may resist it, or experiment with inserting themselves into scenes and poses that they sense are unwholesome representations of female sexuality.

A Flickr artist called prettybabycarla realizes that the provocativeness of Balthus' girls is more a matter of pose than of exposure. She seeks to break their spell by shattering them into fragments: the more provocative, the more pieces, gaps, and displacements.

The figure here is from the painting Les Beaux Jours which, in the original, unfractured form, was used on the cover of the paperback edition of Nabokov's Lolita. prettybabycarla does this with several of the other desirable young femmes in Balthus, making them much less seductive.

One who chooses to experiment by assuming the position is Miss Aniela (N. A. Dybisz), the very popular Flickr self-portraitist. Her set of eight "Balthus Series" tributes feature three nude studies with illuminated lamp shades and three other nude studies. Three can be said to be inspired by particular paintings, the closest being perhaps Balthus' best-known Thérèse Revant, a painting very similar to Jeune Fille au Chat:

Miss Aniela appends a long caption to this tribute to Therése Revant, She tells us that she bought the red shoes and chair especially for the shot, that it was important for the pose to be quite uncomfortable, and that her intention was to parody Balthus' "infamous groin-flashing girls" and to make the image less sensual and more seedy. It is not clear to me that she succeeded in those intentions or why she had them; the bookshelves create a sort of dormitory room look, and the little print of the original image propped up on the shelf is a kind of co-presence and a bit arty and contrived, but not seedy. Perhaps opening up the legs for a better crotch shot is what she means. She may flirt with the "pervy" in her "figurative" love affair with Balthus, but she stays on the safe side of modesty and the censor in not giving looks at her nipples or sex. Of her "reproduction" of Balthus' Alice, she says “I haven't flashed my breast or pubic area, or made my eyes like a zombie's; and I've added a mirror, so I've taken only one strand of Balthus' painting and left out the pervy bits.” Unfortunately, the resulting image makes little sense: the original Alice makes good sense if she is combing her hair facing a mirror and hence we are voyeurs gazing through or around it. Miss Aniela puts the mirror behind her(self), which generates an interesting back view, but is it common to stand back to a mirror to brush one's hair? (Soft focus and vignetting again.) The resulting images are Balthus-authorized cheesecake. Clive Scott suggests that captions mediate between the photographic subject and the viewer, promising contact between viewer and viewed, and thus conceal the irrecoverable pastness of the moment recorded in the photo (54-55). Miss Aniela works the caption hard to portray her photos as a continuation of everyday life and to pretend that she is not doing what she is doing, namely, teasing.

But is there a audience for this sort of thing, more photoblog than exhibit? This image has been viewed 44,531 times and 714 people have faved it, the most in the Balthus set, though none in the set have less than 287 faves.

Despite her evident desire to imaginatively inhabit the worlds and even the bodies of Balthus's girls and women, co-presence is not really a pressing concern for Miss Aniela, though she does provide small versions of the two very similar sources for Girl with red shoes in her comments and the small, postcard version in the center of the photo. Valerie Lamontagne, a Canadian artist and designer, in a project called Becoming Balthus, felt a similar fascination and hit upon the device of photographing herself in the posture of the central figure and then layering that image in the central figure in several of these paintings:

These photos strongly suggest what it would be like for a woman to imagine herself into a Balthus scenario, identifying with the girl, though not the girl. She photographs herself in wellnigh the same posture as the girl and then layers that image into the original, but with reduced opacity. The effect is like spirit photography, but in this case, the photographer is the spirit. Lamontagne's ghost matches the pose of the girl figure as very closely, but she is distinct to various degrees from the girl in each of the images. In the one shown here (Jeune fille au chat), she, especially her face, is quite distinct and she might be seen as the woman the girl is dreaming of becoming, or the woman remembering herself as a girl musing.^[3] In Lamontagne's project, co-presence becomes virtual identity and identity means being subsumed into Balthus's world. (She too declines frontal nudity in her version of Alice, but in her version of La Toilette de Cathie, she decides there is no help for it but to go full frontal.)

Becoming Balthus has been exhibited several places in Canada and it is indeed a much larger project than one finds on Flickr. Lamontagne is not a Flickr photographer.

The device of making both source and homage figures visible in the homage was used twenty years ago by Victor Burgin in his suite of seven pieces The Office at Night. This set of photos is based on Edward Hopper's very famous painting of the same name. The model for the homages was Burgin's wife, just as Hopper's wife Jo was the model in the original series, but there is no merging/identification of the images of the two women. The Office at Night is not so famous that detailed familiarity can be assumed. The relevant portions of it are projected to anchor down the "past" part of these past-present photos:

Victor Burgin
The Office At Night
[mouse over to see studio set-up]

The past parts of the new photo are blurred, with a sense of "remembered", placed in the background (projected there, we see) and rendered grayscale, along with everything else. In the Spring of 2005, Burgin delivered a substantial lecture at the Tate describing this work in the larger perspective of seeing the past in the present and it is recommended reading for anyone interested in our topic (The Separateness of Things).

Flash video, by the way, provides a new option for co-presence which is employed by the on-line Guardian's Arts page to show how thirteen of Tom Hunter's Living in Hell series are related to their sources by showing them fade-dissolving into them. (Rat in Bed is number four in the series<./p>

One of the seven pieces from Burgin's suite has been posted to Flickr, but more importantly, the technique is revived by a_bout_de_souffle (Antonio Gabrieli). In each of his Hopperesque series of 6, there is part or all of a Hopper interior in soft focus on the left with a harder focus "now" figure in the right foreground who is in some way a counterpart or extension of the source painting. All but one are sepia toned and there is much shadowing to join the two. One or two figures are present, but separate from each other and the figure in the paintings. This is one of the most faved ones (117 faves):

Gabriele has not posted a huge number of photos to Flickr, but each is carefully made and manipulated according to a distinctive program: he shows his work on many groups with the words Expressionist, Conceptual, Emotion, Dream, Cinematographic, Tristesse, Bitter Soul, and Detail is the Enemy. Oh, yes, and HOPPEResque and EDWARD HOPPER an ode to the artist (each of these last with over 2000 photos). Hopper is probably the most popular painter for Flickrites, and Gabriele's selection and treatment of his paintings is consistent with a common construction of his work as expressing the isolation and anomie of Modern Life and the abandonment and desolation of streets at night. That is one reading, for example, of that Icon of Modern Life, Nighthawks, and even The Office at Night, but all is not quite at the level of grimness that Gabriele implies in New York Movie (his #1) or Western Motel (his #7).

It seems pointless to start a debate over whether Gabriele's construction of the "Hopperesque" is faithful to Hopper's oeuvre and in any case it is not the way Flickr operates, since there is no competition for gallery space or price at auction, and nobody on Flickr seems to feel ownership of terms is worth establishing or defending. People are free to construct "that typical Hopper mood" and claim inspiration by his paintings and add their photos to the relevant Groups. They make their cases for alternative takes on "Hopper" with photos, not words. Even when an photographer exhibits lamentable obtuseness or ignorance, as happens quite often in the case of Wyeth's Christina's World, a commenter will write a sentence about Christina Olson's disability, or, if that doesn't seem to get through, make a visual pointer in the right direction.

The visual components of Hopper's style—the directional sunlight during the day and neon cum streetlight at night both with their deep shadows, the strong vertical-horizontal grid, the absence of clutter—are easy to grasp and fairly easy to emulate photographically, and his is one of the few styles that Flickr photographers feel that they can simulate and expect recognition as a style. Thus the "HOPPEResque" Group has so many contributions (2100). Here are two that I offer to show that cafe scenes of some warmth and companionship can also trace a link to Hopper's work, if only, or especially, to Chop Suey:

I'm sure Hopper never did overhead spot lighting, but if he had, he would have done them like this. And this one, just in from Berlin, from the Exterminating Angel bar in Kreuzberg, already with 54 faves:

To be sure, this this sort of foreground/middleground setup is not Hopper, though it is quite like a Gabriele-Hopper. The relationship between the waitress figure in the foreground the the couple in the corner is not the simple one of reduplication ("in art then, in life now") that prevails in Gabriele's site, but more one of contrast. Neither title nor caption are very helpful, but she does give it the tag feierabend (which is roughly "end of the working day"). I see this as applying to the waitress even more than the couple, and of course in a quite different way. This photo is posted to both Hopper groups as well as a dozen others and is part of a forty-photo suite of mainly bar interiors in the Kreuzburg section of Berlin. These are low light with several blurs and much soft focus; she submitted many of them to groups like Gabriele's and added Depression, Solitude, Nostalgia, and chiaroscuro. Expressionist Berlin is back in business. Gabriele is a fan of ...alisa, commenting very positively on a good number of this suite, including, several times, quasi un dipinto. This, or its English equivalent "like a painting," is increasingly used in these parts of the Flickr world and apparently is high praise.

Further, dim (aka "available") light or night photography tends to produce a Hopper look because the available depth of field is very shallow. The photo will have a relatively focused and illuminated zone and a lot of surrounding soft focus and shadow (which translates readily as "a spot of warmth and comfort in a dark and shapeless, perhaps frightening, world." This meaning seems fully globalized, if this very new hopperesque night in ho chi minh by the talented Japanese photographer motocchio (motoko) is an indication (twelve faves in less than three weeks). Also, low light photography is done at ASA film speed of 400 or higher, which tends to produce graininess or its digital equivalent, noise. That is one reason Doug Hawks' night cafe scene Homage to Dega is remarkable for its sharp focus (shot, if anyone wants to know, with Ilford Delta 400 film). Brigatte.com shot After Hopper with a digital camera at ASA 800 and it has a little softness in it attributable to noise, but decent depth of field.

Hopper is being reinvented, at least on Flickr, as we enter the 21st century. In America, the prevailing and deeply entrenched view of Hopper's urban and interior paintings is the "anomie and isolation" story with Nighthawks usually taken as its epitome. The following clips picked off the top of Google's offerings:
Cited on blog Helquin Artifacts :

In the Art Institute of Chicago hangs one of the most enduring portraits of American nightlife rendered in this century, an icon of urban anomie so widely recognized it has become a cliché for marketing spoofs. Yet hundreds of thousands of visitors who every year come to view the original of Edward Hopper's 'Nighthawks' are struck by its power to rivet our attention on three customers who share a space but nothing else in the stark light of a 1940s diner. ~ “From Ancient Egypt to Andy Warhol, Chicago's Art Institute Amazes,” Psychiatric News, 18 February 2000

From the National Gallery of Art Timeline page for its Hopper exhibit, 2007-8:

Edward Hopper (1882-1967) produced some of the most enduringly popular images in American art. Throughout his career, he created quiet, yet riveting pictures of ordinary people and places, which in his hands became dramatic scenes that express a sense of isolation, anomie, and the bittersweet comfort of being alone.

From the catalogue to the Online Collection of the Harold B. Lee Library at Brigham Young University:

As an illustration of Regionalism, Edward Hopper's ""Nighthawks"" represents the anomie and pathos of Americans. The emptiness and stillness of the painting communicates the spiritual void of the environment and the subjects.

Does no one notice the woman's left hand touching her companion's? It is as if "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams" got attached to this painting via the parody of it by Gottfried Helnwin (with Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart, James Dean, and Elvis as the counter man) and the endless reiterations of the song by performers from Tony Bennett to Greenday.

On Flickr, however, the takes on Nighthawks find human warmth and camaraderie in the little lighted space in a dark world—the diner as urban campfire. Of 25 homages to Nighthawks in the EDWARD HOPPER an ode to the artist Group, fully half include two or more figures who are together, not alone. (The figures are comparable for the HOPPEResque Group.) It is worth noting that majority of the urban campfire homages are not by Americans: British, French, German, Italian, Japanese... but back in the USA (Puget Sound), disconnection is still a cardinal trait of a Hopper.

As a culminating case of how critical issues are argued in Flickr, consider this popular Hopper homage (310 faves):

This received about 100 comments, including several invitations to post it to Groups, recognizing and applauding it as a Hopper, and even commending the quality of the comments themselves. Also, the photo has "notes" (short comments laid over the image as hot spots). From the queries and answers, we learn that the photo was a capture taken in the Piccadilly Underground station in London (with comments on the voyeurism and surveillance). The notes are mostly the imagined thoughts of the two women facing each other, about the possible craziness of the other, noting anomalous behavior like the placement of the central woman's foot on the seat across from her and speculation that the older woman is in fact holding up a gun, that they are both spies heretofore strangers to each other, and so on. One commenter even observes that it is very odd, these two women look like older and younger versions of the same person. But what is truly odd is that no one comments on the profiles of the two women or suggests that they might be mother and daughter. Even in the heart of modern London, people do go about sometimes in public with their parents. Nobody in the 100 comments mentions this possibility, and that requires some explanation—which, I think, is that they all are viewing a scene to be interpreted after the fashion of Hopper and specifically Nighthawks-as-commonly-understood, and two people apparently in the midst of a serious conversation are an almost inexplicable anomaly. In a world of strangers, full attention is given only to intrusive, crazy ones.

Every homage to a painting in the historical archive of Western art involves an interpretation and a claim of kinship and if kin then entitled to some of the special attention we give the source. Sometimes the claim is flimsy and the homage seems an attempt to borrow a small portion of the cultural capital of the source. A claim is flimsy when the photo matches some features of the source—some of its look— but does not seem to grasp its inner rationale or find another one of its own. When the claim of kinship is to a classic nude study, it is weakened by what we call explicitness and is a fairly easily recognised combination of bright light, sharp focus, proximity of camera, passivity of posture, and disclosure of sexual parts. If it does not shed some of these properties, a photo is likely to lose the protection and special privilege of its source. A claim totters when it is presented in too garrulous or chatty a manner, and it is shakey indeed when viewers cannot tell exactly what the source is. But there are many very fine homages that avoid these failings and establish a rich and thoughtful relation to the source that makes good the claim "inspired by." These pages offer one model of what it might mean to filter photos after publication.

Please to note, however, that this filtering comes from outside the world of Flicker. It is not an automatic function of the self-organizing Groups and communities of practice that are the core of Flickr as a social tool. It cannot be carried out simply by counting views or faves or other rankings. On Flickr, perhaps surprisingly, one finds very few arguments about whether claims of kinship are insightful or well grounded. Flickr photographers apparently see at least two rather different "Hoppers," for example, yet no one is arguing that one "Hopper" is sounder or richer than another. No one holds forth on the importance of sharpness for pure photography or the dangers and joys of showing versus telling, or any of the other traditional questions of photographic aesthetics (though there is considerable sparring over the ethics of street photography). On a self-organized network like Flickr, no one has the authority to render credible definitive judgments; there are no arbiters of refined taste. Nor perhaps are any needed. Insofar as Flickr Groups are communities of practice, seeking to improve the eyes and skills and understanding of their participants, they can concern themselves more with inspiration than replication or the placement of a photo in a scheme of hierarchized value. Insofar as we are viewers less in search of inspiration for our photographs than illumination and the special pleasure of finding interesting photos, we can find on Flickr clusters and comparisons that will sharpen our critical eyes and skills—which are very much needed in this virtual museum not only without walls but without appointed Critics. We just have to know how to look.

Footnotes

Works Consulted

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Berman, Marshall. "Meyer Schapiro: The Presence of the Subject," New Politics, vol. 5, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 20, Winter 1996. http://www.wpunj.edu/~newpol/issue20/berman20.htm

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Cotton, Charlotte. The Photograph as Contemporary Art. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004).

Derrida, Jacques. The Truth in Painting, trs. Geoff Bennington and Ian MacLeod. University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Elkins, James. Six Stories from the End of Representation. Stanford University Press, 2008.

Emerson, Peter Henry. Naturalistic Photography for Students of the Art. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889.

Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.

Pollock, Griselda. "Nude Bodies: Displacing the Boundaries between Art and Pornography," in Sean T. Sweeney and Ian Hodder, eds., The Body. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 94-126.

Ruben, Matthew. "The sole of deconstruction: preparations for the truth in mourning," Critical Quarterly, 39.4:25-38.

Scott, Clive. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language. London: Reaktion Books, 1999.

Shirky, Clay. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations. New York: Penguin Press, 2008.