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Feb 15 2006

Why I Won’t Be Renewing My Flickr Account

Posted at 9:58 am under Sad

Flickr used to be cool. It used to be a community of folks that shot pics and bs’ed about photos, commented on stuff, etc. For a brief moment, I left Flickr entirely, having had it beyond my breaking point with all the politics that had crept onto the site (an affliction facing many of my favorite sites including Digg.com, Slashdot, and others).

Flickr has now added Community Guidelines. Amongst them, this gem under the Do Not section:

Upload photos that include frontal nudity, genitalia or anything else that your bathing suit should cover in public areas of Flickr
If you do we’ll make your photostream private and remind you of this Guideline. If you don’t heed our warning and continue to make similar content public, we’ll terminate your account without warning. This applies to your Buddy Icon as well.

Excuse me?

At what point did artful photography become taboo on Flickr?

I’ve seen some amazing nudes on Flickr. They’re not “get you aroused and hide in the bathroom with it” material, to be honest. They’re emotionally honest artfully done photography, not pornography. Flickr, apparently in an effort to cleanse the community of anything that might fall into the hands of children (or whatever other “friendly” guidelines they’ve decided to follow), has decided that nudes are now off-limits (if you’ll notice there are no distinctions in that guideline for pornography vs. nudes).

As far as I’m concerned, this is an unacceptable stance for a photographic community.

Photography is an art form, and as such, nudes are part of the territory. To close them off wholesale is utter crap. With this one move, Flickr has pretty much said exactly where they stand on photography. Their site isn’t for photographers and the art of photography, it’s for families to share snapshots of Christmas morning.

That’s fine, really. I’ve already been uploading a lot of content to my own photoblog, and when my account expires over at Flickr, I’ll just move right along like I did with other “must have” services like Blogger. I imagine many of the serious photographers on Flickr will do so right along with me. It should be interesting to see how many of the people who were outraged over Google’s censorship in China react to Flickr’s censorship right here.

Understand, I do think they have every right to do it.

And I have every right to walk away.

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2 Responses to “Why I Won’t Be Renewing My Flickr Account”

  1. Trish Says:
    February 15th, 2006 at 10:52 am

    I guess because that site is public and open to children. I agree with you, though, but another blogger/photographer has nudes on his flickr site and he just publishes the password on his blog.

  2. Bridget Says:
    February 15th, 2006 at 12:55 pm

    If children are gonna view be able to have unlimited access to it, I can see where they are coming from. Granted the access restrictions lie with the parents! That aside, there is porno nudity and there is art nudity. I’m an artist. Eventually, I will be going to art school to hone my skills and learn what I don’t know. And I already know that one of the portions of the art class I’m going to take is that of sketching nudes. It’s not a peep show, it’s an art class.

    I see where you are coming from and I see where they are coming from.

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