A response written on Gail Orenstien’s Flickr Blog:

Awesome data, Gail. d_nurv sent me a link to this page and the resulting discussion is also eye opening. I appreciate and understand the issue here.

There are many factors involved, some relative to the ‘walled garden’ approach to internet access, and others to create G rated ‘walled gardens’ Disney’s new website was lambasted by critics uopn it’s recent launch as being too restrictive www.techdirt.com/articles/20070102/113639.shtml
and yet those restrictions designed to make it ‘kid and family’ friendly has created great success.

I think Flickr is trying to search for a system that can allow for both G rating as well as ‘adult’, a difficult proposition in this Wild West of new Social Networking. There are alway going to me those elements that ‘game’ the system.

In any ‘Free’ society, there has to be a balance between ‘Freedom’ and ‘personal responsibily’.I have written and ranted quite a lot over this subject over the last year on Flickr. I was briefly ‘censored’ until I relabled some of my content, and only recently have been un-NIPSA’d, so that my pics can be found in ‘open search’ So I have been there, done that. An aside, I have really been a big fan of your stream, Gail, Kudos !

My attraction to the Flickr community has been because Flickr is an ‘Adult’ community using the nature of attraction based on aesthetics. The interaction has largely been polite, respectful and somewhat empathetic.

The recent discovery of ‘factions’ within Flickr pushing an agenda to sanitize ‘content’, trying to push the direction of ‘acceptable’ Flickr photographs to pics of puppies and flowers is disturbing, to say the least: tarky7.com/

But it is an event that we as a community need to enforce and report abuse to the admins of Flickr like any other abuse. The only way we can keep Flickr and ‘adult’ and ‘open’ community it to be part of it and fight for our rights as hard or harder, giving voice to the ‘rational’.

Jumping ship only means there are less hands left to protect the rights that artists have fought and died for throughout history, namely, the right to free self expression.

The notions that Flickr has about the dividing line of painting and photography are certainly quaint, don’t ya think. Pre-Photoshop and silly. I studied painting, commercial Illustration and Industrial Design and did Graphic Design production work during my summers. I only started assisting when I did because working in restaurants to support myself as an actor in NYC became too tedious.

And that is how I became a photographer. hhmmm. So , where does photography and painting separate in my life ? I started taking picture in my teens and I shot slides cause I had a technique projecting slides of portraits onto board mounted on the wall and drew into them with pencil to ‘draw’ very accurate and stylish portraits of people. A modern Camera Obsura. So where is the separation ?

In the mid 80′s my whole portfolio was made up of SX-70′s which I had used Caran Dache crayons to draw and paint on….hhhhmmmm…so where is the separation ?