Bye, bye Flickr!!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lamarde/3559377704/”>www.flickr.com/photos/lamarde/3559377704/
From time to time you hear about censorship at Flickr. I accompanied those stories but I had never felt I need to do something about it. Now I do. One of my contacts had the most absurd experience with Flickr. She is a psychologist who collects and organizes vintage advertisements (publicity) to tobacco. The ads are from different artists, different times. With effort she has accomplished a very interesting and complete archive. Quite honestly I always thought about her work as a public service in the field of history of graphical commercial arts. Usually the people who achieve what she has achieved work in museums and are well paid for this type of commitment.
The Flickr community doesn’t seem to think so.
#1: From what I can understand it all started when some people denounced her photo stream has an incentive to smoking. So, my dears, it’s not allowed to collect smoking related graphic art in Flickr. It’s considered dangerous. You might feel a sudden urge to start smoking by watching drawings of the beginnings of advertising. Boeuf!
#2: I had some photos with some relation to tobacco. I never had my photos denounced in any way. That’s astonishing. My photos are a lot more graphical than vintage publicity. The thing is: I have not a lot of views. Flickr does not assume a clear policy on what it tolerates or not in their site, it’s up to the community (meaning even a single individual who might be dumb as hell, or distracted as hell, or someone who does not like me) to censor my work. So, my work being accepted or not does not depend on any common sense, any formal and common rule, but only in the mental deviations of a few. That is very cool indeed.
#3: One of the arguments they used to censor Lamarde’s collection was that she was not the author of the works in display. She was not. It was very old publicity. VERY OLD?! As in intellectual property rights passed away?! From that perspective you had to prohibit museums displays and the "The Commons" here on Flickr (one of their best ideas by the way).
#4: Isn’t Flickr/Yahoo an American company? Do you mean that in the USA an individual cannot start a collection of commercial art and make it public? Are you creating a new system? Hmmm… let’s call it chic-communism, shall we? In chic-communism everything is done for the sake of the community, but its one individual who can censor and destroy the common good (I’m assuming that having collections of art is a common good. Correct me if I’m wrong).
#5: I’m sorry to say I had it. I feel solidarity towards Lamarde and all the rest who were censored here. I’m deleting all my photos from Flickr. All of them. There are alternatives.
