Ubiquitous Photography & Web 2.0 Platform

Ubiquitous: present, appearing, or found everywhere.

Ubiquitous photography refers to images that are visually similar and can be found in many places. This can refer to the way that images are distributed widely, especially through the use of social media. Web 2.0. allows users to contribute content to the internet, as opposed to Web 1.0. which was just an information archive for passive viewing. With web 2.0. people use social media websites such as Flickr to share their photographs in order to form a collective social community,

Jose van Dijck - Flickr and the culture of connectivity: Sharing views, experiences, memories

Photograph sharing websites such as Flickr create a communal experience to express its user's views. Sharing photos leads to a collective perspectives, experiences and memory. In terms of sharing perspectives, social media sites allow users to collect their ideas and form an agreed upon viewpoint. With collective experience people form their identities through sharing pictures. Finally social media is used as a collective memory whereby people upload their pictures to look back upon. Dijick argues that it has become an "unsconscious technological pursuit" as most people upload pictures to social media without thinking too much about it.

"Sharing pictures in the present naturally leads to a collective interpretation of the past."

Penelope Umbrico

Compiles similar photographs that she has found on Google Images, to create collage prints. Similar topic to authorship since she uses other people's photographs

The image above is from Umbrico's project called 'Suns of Flickr'. It denotes a collection of pictures of sunsets that were found on website Flickr. "This is a project I started when I found 541,795 pictures of sunsets searching the word “sunset” on the image hosting website, Flickr. I cropped just the suns from these pictures and uploaded them to Kodak, making 4" x 6" machine prints from them." It's interesting how all the images have a similar colours and composition.

Joachim Schmid

Joachim Schmid collects photographs that are similar in order to display trends at a certain time. Since the development of Web2.0 he has been able to discover more photographs through the internet on websites such as Flickr. 

The photograph above is from his book collection called 'Other People's Photographs', and this set of photographs is called 'Kisses for Me'. It denotes many people kissing themselves in the mirror. Like many of his other collections, this set shows a slightly absurd amateur photographic trend. I think that Schmid's work is interesting because in many years to come people will look back at current trends and find it peculiar.