Jamari Lior

SOCIAL NETWORKS – and my humble opinion…

// Juni 3rd, 2010 // Einblicke

This one is in English again, as quite some of the social networks are international – and if not, at least it sounds like that…
So, there are hundreds of social networks which come and go and I have joined some of them already: model-kartei, one4model, studivz, facebook, modelmayhem, juuuz etc. Actually, by now, I would need an employee to keep everybody updated when I have my french fries, when I had nightmares and when I had sex. And, of course, even more important, how successful I was in all these!

To be honest: I am not interested! I dont wanna know, what exactly you do at what time, how many buddies you have, if you found a dead kitten on farmville etc. So am I anti-social? First of all, I am not looking for friends among the photographic communities. Yes, there are some people that did become friends and I am very much looking forward for more. Some of these people, I really like and always look forward to meet, but with many I know, that they would immediately stop every contact and interest in me if they knew I would stop to take pictures or just change my style. Many of you know that I fancy pictorial photographs rather than just the fashion “as if I could be in Vogue”- style – which doesn’t make it much easier as most of the community-members seem to favour the latter. In my opinion, this causes some kind of a uniformist style, and as most communities are based on actuality (new uploaded pics, news etc.), it sometimes seems to come down to “who is the first to copy the recent tush- or vogue-picts”.

Of course, I do use communities. Why then?

Most of them just to redirect people to my website, in case they are interested – and this works. Sometimes I even got some exhibitionist-moments and tell you private stuff – primarily on my blog or twitter stream.

And at least some of the communities really can be used to find clients, models and jobs.

There are advantages and disadvantages in different communities:

• Fotocommunity, which nowadays seems to be a bit “out” among the younger generation, makes regular updates interesting, but does not provide an easy overview over your general style and is not really designed to announce and find jobs.
• Facebook seems to succeed studivz, but is not super effective if you look for more than your buddies’ news and the latest partys.
• Juuuz is a more elitist network which you can enter only after a voting of all members – something I sort of frown upon: I know good photographers who didn’t make it and vice versa – so it probably needs a good mainstream taste or style to succeed. Being elitist, it is of course, often a problem to reach a critical mass.
• The most wellknown network for models and photographers is model-kartei. For my taste, this is the best concept. As everybody who fulfills minimal requirements can join, the average quality is not superb, but this means as well that you don’t need to produce mainstream and still can find your fans and friends. It is quite effective if you want to get shootings, workshops etc. and you can see on first view who produces what – and not just their last works. Still model-kartei costs me quite some time. Some people there think my sedcard-text is not friendly enough and don’t dare to contact me, for others it is obviously too friendly and they seem to have some strange self-confidence flashs and don’t even read my conditions, as in significant mails just as “hey, I luv your snaps, wanna shoot?”, or “do you do tfp?” even though there is a whole passage on my sedcard on the conditions, under which I do TFP an when I don’t. But answering questions like this is obviously party of my business, as networking is, along with all the superficialities it brings. And at least sometimes it leads to getting to know interesting people…

So, here I have to come to an end – still got mails to answer on model-kartei and the like…