As we all too well know, the right combination of the internet and photography can provide for some highly addictive websites. Whether it is online galleries, photo-sharing networks, art projects, well-designed portfolios, or friends' ffffound accounts, our ability to easily discover, aggregate, and create galleries of compelling images is in large part attributable to the ease of the web.
Enter mus-mus, a collaborative photography space on the web founded earlier this year that "will strive to use the ease and power of the web combined with the talents and camaraderie of the global photography community to develop a striking online archive of images." They do this by compelling photographers and photo-experts to contemplate a topic, most recently by taking us on a quick virtual trip to gay ol' @PARIS. In this newest "exhibit," mus-mus presents essays and a photo gallery featuring work by our own Joe Holmes, Colleen Plumb and Beth Dow, Hot Shot Georg Parthen, contender Shane Lavalette, and many other names familiar to the JBP family.
Darius Himes, one of our esteemed Hot Shot panelists also makes his mark on @PARIS in an essay titled Abdu'l-Baha In Paris. Himes examines a photograph of Abdu'l-Baha Abbas, a man photographed at age 65 under the Eiffel Tower after being exiled from Persia for 50 years, and suggests that the moment captured is both an explicit record of the past as well as a "signpost" for the future. While the group's posture, suggestion of time and day, and the history of the subject's travels become locked into the story of this single frame, the ideas of Abbas and his desire to build cultural bridges, cannot be bound to this image alone. History and photography are also entrenched in Ulrich Baer's essay Photography and Paris as the Promise of Possibility. Both essays are available, in full, online.
The photographs in @PARIS are displayed in non-symmetric columns and span the gamut from historical to whimsical. Jurors Stephen Shore, Gil Blank, and Denise Wolff had the tough task of capturing the essence of place through this curated selection of images. Like any portrait of a place, one version exists through the eye of the beholder, but a more collective (if less cohesive) version exists through the eyes of many. Bruce Davidson's Central Park is a very different place than Tod Papageorge's, which is a very different place from the Central Park of all flickr users combined. In creating a collective portrait of Paris, already imbued with heightened romance, style, nostalgia and history, it invites the challenge upon the jurors of discerning the ineffable elements that comprise true Parisian essence. Click over to the gallery to see the full collection of images.
We're always excited to see photography being curated and presented in new ways online, like mus-mus has done here. We're curious—what are some of your favorite web-only photography projects, and how does the presentation service the medium?