OII Blog

Edgar Gómez Cruz is a student from the IN3 (Internet Interdisciplinary Institute) in Barcelona, currently visiting the OII to work on his thesis, which he describes as ‘a sociological study with anthropological methodology .. with a focus on photography’. Practically, this means that he has been hanging about in Flickr for the last five years (the last two as an object of study) and is currently participating with some groups in Oxford.

I met up with him this morning to go out into the chill November air to discuss photographs and communities and digital things over coffee. He started off by telling me about the online photographer communities he studies and the fact that … they are aware that they are study objects. It sounded like they were being slightly hilarious by ganging up on him (in an affectionate way .. eg by giving him a slightly patronising pet name etc.) but I guess this is an occupational hazard for any ethnographer studying intelligent curious people.

‘These people just rearranged their lives around the technology,’ he said. He happened to be sitting there in a quite cool T-shirt with a big camera on it. So I asked if his years of studying and interacting with these communities had actually come to affect him in any way (preparing myself for something complicated and reflexive). He thought for a moment, then smiled: ‘Well. I had to spend A LOT of money on cameras’ and went on to describe how he has been developing a deep engagement with photography himself.

We hovered over many things: access to Flickr data and what you could do with it / Flickr recently introducing the (Facebooky) ability to tag Flickr users within photographs, and whether or not people liked this / where is Flickr going? / Microsoft bringing out the SenseCam that is ‘designed to take photographs passively, without user intervention, while it is being worn’ / tagging and searching and metadata and ubiquity and surveillance and all of that / people as brands / photography as habit / and video: what’s with that?

We finally veered into the area of photography as artform (history of / implicit snobbery within / boundaries and boundary-busting / subversion etc. the usual stuff, I guess). I suppose we are all amateur professionals (or professional amateurs) these days, and that everything we do is beautiful and wonderful and important … but surely there must be a lot of terrible terrible stuff being uploaded out there? So I wondered: ‘Is there such a thing as objectively bad photography?’ [I have since spent time looking up 'mistake failure rubbish awful' etc on Flickr and ... well. Not actually as funny or interesting as I thought it might be. Hem. Rather boring and depressing, actually.]

Edgar’s own Flickr account is at: Tesista (A veces de pata de perro) [Flickr]

So we looked at his own photos for a while (seriously worth a look). And then it suddenly became very cold and we scuttled back inside.

Edgar blogs (and keeps his publications) at: Tesis-Antítesis (mostly in Spanish but with some posts in English), and his research group in Barcelona is at: http://mediacciones.es/

Edgar will be at the OII until December. He is giving a DPhil seminar on his research (24 November 09) and then a brownbag seminar (1 December 09) later this term with OII Research Fellow Eric Meyer.