14 DAY TRIAL // People take a lot of photos each day and upload many of them to photo sharing sites or social networks like Facebook. So many photos are uploaded that the number loses significance to most people, especially since all of this happens online where everything is harder to quantify.
A new art installation at the Foam art gallery in Amsterdam aims to change people's perceptions on this or at least provide a measurable way of realizing just how much we share.
The installation's creator, Erik Kessels, took just one day's worth of public photos uploaded to Flickr and printed them out. The result is one million printed photos filling, quite literally, a couple of rooms.
The scope of the project is not to display the photos, it would be close to impossible to showcase one million photos and, of course, no one would be able to view them all.
Instead, the photos are piled on top of each other in massive heaps, a less-than subtle symbol for the amount of photos we share.
"We're exposed to an overload of images nowadays," Kessels explained, according to Creative Review.
"This glut is in large part the result of image-sharing sites like Flickr, networking sites like Facebook, and picture-based search engines. Their content mingles public and private, with the very personal being openly and un-selfconsciously displayed," he said.
"By printing all the images uploaded in a 24-hour period, I visualise the feeling of drowning in representations of other peoples' experiences," he mentioned.
The project hits its target in that it does provide a sense of the scale of sites like Flickr. Keep in mind that there are over six billion images on Flickr at this point, uploaded over the years.
And Facebook is seeing this many photos every couple of months or so and the rate is growing.
However, there's one thing going against the argument that maybe we're sharing too much. Most people upload their photos with the expectations that a few others will see them, their friends and maybe some random people if they publish the photos publicly.
No one expects that their photo will be seen by everyone that can see it, i.e. everyone on the web, and no one expects that just because you can see all these photos, or anything else online, you could or should see them.