Yellow
It’s been a couple of weeks now since Google+ went live and it’s quickly found favor with photographers around the world. A lot of people are spending a lot of time setting up circles, uploading photographs, sharing work and generally exploring the service. There’s a real buzz (no pun intended) around it, an excitement that is infectious. Hangouts, huddles, lists of photographers, circles, streams and more. Well over 1000 photographers have added themselves to the unofficial photographers list as I write this and it’s growing by the hour. I’m probably not just speaking for myself when I say that I’ve discovered more great work by photographers I previously didn’t know in the past couple of weeks on Google Plus than I had in the previous six months. And that’s great.
It’s obviously early days still for this new social media service but it’s still worth asking where it’s going. As it seems to stand at the moment, photographers are busy creating various photo circles and then posting work to those circles. If the work is good enough, they’ll get a +1 or maybe a comment saying something like “Wow” or “That’s awesome”. You don’t need to be a genius to see where this may end up. Could we find ourselves posting in what has become a bubble, sharing work only with people who are predisposed to like it? Is it meaningful if you post a new photo and a circle of your fans tell you how wonderful it is? Does it become a bit like preaching to the converted?
One of the most commonly heard complaints about Flickr is that it offers no meaningful critique or interaction. A bunch of “wow” comments and some adding of photos to favorites and not much else. If you don’t play the game, your photos sink without trace. Does Google+ risk falling into the same traps? Or is it an unavoidable aspect of online photo sharing? When I first started posting photos online at photo.net back in about 2002, there was a much smaller pool of people doing so and it was more conducive to constructive feedback. It got to a point it just became a ratings game and a lot of photographers left, heading for the new (at the time) option, Flickr. The same thing happened at Flickr, it soon descended into a backslapping, high-five type service. Is it inevitable that online services that allow for photos to be shared will ultimately become nothing more than a lovefest?
That may be all that people want. Perhaps having somebody say wow is all we need to validate our creativity and our reinforce our decisions to spend thousands of dollars and invest thousands of hours on the pursuit of photography. If that’s the extent of it, then by all means embrace that. Not everything needs to be instilled with any deeper significance.
For a lot of photographers however, that may not be desired. You may want feedback from more experienced photographers, or you may want an opinion on whether a shot works or not. So make it happen. Create your own circle of photographers interested in critique or advice or feedback of some kind and share with them. If you’re on Google+ now, you have a great opportunity to set it up in ways that will work best for you. Experiment with your circles and you can avoid the backslapping bubbles. Put a call out for creatives in different areas and see who is interested in viewing your work. Find and work with mentors. If you’re a working photographer, create circles for photo editors, art buyers and clients you’ve already worked with and share new work with them. Create another one with dream clients and share to that.
The best way to avoid Google Plus becoming a bubble is to be proactive from the start. Make connections, interact with people and seek new opportunities. Join hangouts discussing the art and business of photography. Collaborate with photographers from across the globe on a project. Reach out to people you wouldn’t normally come into contact with and create meaningful interaction. If you treat it the same as all the other photo sharing and social media options, you’ll get the same results as you got from the others. If you want more than that, then do something different. As they say, you get out what you put in.
