Flickr Stagnation

Hello Flickr People

I’m still here. I have been following the guidelines set down by the governor of my state, which means I have largely been holed up in my humble abode watching daddy-long-leg spiders romp across my window blinds.

I did take a few runs through Detroit, which is what I used to be notoriously known for when I started Flickr in 2005, a year after I began roaming the streets of Detroit’s decimated neighborhoods.

I decided to document life in Detroit’s ravaged neighborhoods, long before other large industrial areas joined the ranks.

Detroit is changing. The mid and downtown areas have been completely transformed: it is stunning, a complete makeover. Yuppie condos are sprouting at an alarming rate in the downtown area. Living down there has become fashionable with those gainfully employed millennials not living in their parent’s basements.

However, many of the neighborhoods are still in dire straits. Whole neighborhoods are abandoned, rows and rows of empty, boarded houses. There is an occasional occupied house here and there, someone who probably lacks the resources to move.

Thousands of the 80,000 abandoned properties have been demolished. And those still standing have been boarded up and painted drab colors. The whole look is boring (from this photographer’s eye.) I am pleased that Detroit is growing, or at least was growing before the pandemic. The pandemic was brutal on the residents as Detroit was one of the hot spots for the virus.

I am not ‘seeing’ photographs; I am not interested in taking shots that would be suitable in a out-of-towners Instagram page.

My viewers have done a complete flip-flop; those interested in my Detroit work have abandoned me. Sigh. I used to have a hard time getting views on my other styles of images, like the minimalism that has captured me. But now my Detroit shots are of little interest…which is why you haven’t seen new stuff lately.

I will be back. Maybe I need to nurture an interest in the nesting habits of daddy long leg spiders. Or maybe take a shot of the inside of my freezer; William Eggleston got away with that.

Why not?

I still visit Flickr regularly and enjoy watching the images roll by. I need to wake up my inner photographer out of his deep sleep induced by cabin fever.