From Tampen we have familiar looking exotic images:
The images are ones I would expect to be able to see in many locations in my home town.
While the exotic exotic images today come from Rigamarole:
I would not expect to be able to see these scenes anywhere in the UK.
So the first two, taken by Tampen of his daughter, show me somethng from my everyday world but with the feel of the exotic - they are richly semiotic. And the second two photos show us Rigmarole’s images from Bombay. These are sights which belong to ‘other people’s’ everyday experiences and are probably mundane to them, but unfamiliar to me. I think that both the pairs of photos show us images which are ’strongly cultural’; they seem more heavily saturated with semiotic stuff than many other images from the same culture may have been. They tell me all sorts of things about how life goes on, values etc. That is to say the images say so many things about the culture from which they come and I think that this is why I find both pairs very powerful.
I like the way I can see such a rich cultural mix of images on Flickr, and looking at the images side by side like this, we can see the primitive roots of aspects of western fashion. Photographs from less technologically advanced countries are the ones which seem the most exotic and ‘othered’ on Flickr however. i think this must be because they are mainly (but not exclusively) brought to Flickr by people from technologically advanced cultures. This is ‘the norm’ of the Flickr perspective.
