When I was a kid, I used to love the big antique stores in northern Michigan - huge prefab aluminum warehouses filled wall-to-wall with bric-a-brac. The best ones weren't the ones with neat booths and museum-like display methods. Nah, the best were the ones that just put things where there was space. Every bit of junk was a clue, a fragment of a wider narrative.
So the Internet is like that for me. The big, big reason to love the Internet is the preponderance of cultural ephemera that I come across every day, without rhyme or reason. Today I found this:
A minute's worth of research told me this is a real LP, released by PTL in the early 80's. This image is now part of my Internet image collection, a project I started last year in New York and have continued each day since. So it's simple really: one day in New York I purchased a new laptop with Windows XP to replace my dying Windows 2000 box. XP, I discovered, featured a bundled screen saver that did a random slideshow of files in the My Pictures directory.
On my old Windows 2000 desktop PC, I'd accumulated modest folder of "misc" images that I'd saved from the net over the previous couple years. These were images that stuck out for one reason or another. - a really cool logo here, a dramatic news photo there, various images I'd encountered by accident on unrelated web searches.
S0 it made sense to just dump the random pictures in My Pictures and make it my screen saver. I fattened the folder up with some of my own images and other images I'd had scattered around my filesystem. But what started out as some practical file organization turned into something more. The screen saver's random image shuffle turned the group of images into an ever changing, often poingnant story. As the collection has grown, the story has become much richer, with moments of comedy, tragedy, eroticism, commerce - moments of exquisite accidental photography and carefully directed art.
I'm a pretty resourceful guy on the net, and finding large collections of images is easy. Often people leave large dumps of photos in directories and don't use an index page. In such cases, most web servers will default to a browsable list of the files in the directory. They look like this:
I've gotten tons of images this way, photos of people I'll never meet in places I've not yet been to. Most of the images have come up by accident during web searches for unrelated topics. I'll download entire directories either with urltoys or with the much-less-versatile DownloadThemAll! plug-in for FireFox.
For example, say I'm searching for images of December's tsunami. I'd go to Google and would try this:
"index of" "parent directory" tsunami jpg
This tells google that all pages it returns must include the phrases "index of" and "parent directory" exactly as quoted, and they must also include pages that feature any combination of tsunami and jpg. The phrases "index of" and "parent directory" are nearly always found on server generated index pages.
Play around with various combinations and you can find some interesting stuff.
Some of my friends have caught onto my interest in the strange, bizarre, beautifully-rendered, or otherwise interesting photographs, and nowadays they often contribute. Kyle contributed this:
If there's a lack of context to the pictures, well that's pretty much the point. Still it's natural to be curious, and the chat went like this:
Jason Bentley: wha?
Jason Bentley: there's gotta be context to that :-)
Kyle Hamilton: slipped, flipped, driver bailed before it got caught, motor was still running when the emergency crew got there. or so I'm told. :)
Jason Bentley: That takes...artistry
Kyle Hamilton: Aye.
Jason Bentley: I would love to listen in on the phone call to the parents
Kyle Hamilton: but I rather figured it fit your definition of 'interesting picture'. :)
Jason Bentley: that it does. :-) it's already saved to 'my pictures' :-)
Kyle Hamilton: *waits for blog entry "Some of my friends have caught onto my interest in the strange, bizarre, beautifully-rendered, or otherwise interesting photographs, and..." :)*
