I really love Flickr, and all the amazing photographers you stumble across there, among the cat portraits and overused HDR. Someone somewhere - and I’m sorry I can’t remember where - pointed me towards Rose & Olive, two female photographers from Texas who take wonderful photos. Check out their Flickr stream.
They also have a great little blog, The Ingoing, where they post taken, borrowed and found dirty photos, with minimal commentary (as opposed to the poetic codas to their Flickr collection, part of what makes it great - and shows Flickr as its best as a photoblog, rather than a mere portfolio).
I love the amount of flesh on Flickr. I’m not much of a photography buff, but there’s something I love about the sharing of skin in photographs like these. It’s conscious, and incredibly generous. Much of it is warm, and loving, and that which isn’t - at least where it’s personal, or the photographer’s own - is always artful. There’s an exploration of photography going on here, as people discover the new possibilities of digital photography and the internet, that’s closely akin to sexual discovery.
I’m particularly interested in the amount of Creative Commons-licensed flesh. I’d like to do a Bookkake project based around this photography, an investigation of the naked commons, but it’s hard to know how much of it legally belongs to the photographer, and how much is nicked from elsewhere, or wrongly licensed. Still.
All photos © Rose & Olive.
