I was surprised to see so many images from Coney Island. I had found out about “Click!” through a posting at a Fickr group. I had seen a posting about a prior Brooklyn Museum request for submissions of images on Coney Island, which I had missed, and so with the “changing faces of Brooklyn” request for submissions I didn’t expect to see Coney Island as a regular subject, though obviously it’s a part of Brooklyn.

Regarding the evaluation process I’ll describe my own experience. I didn’t evaluate any images. Not that I didn’t want to but I found myself to be unsuited to the process. Ideally I would have preferred to have been able to view icons or small sized versions of the images and select the ones that appealed to me for closer, full sized, evaluation. I don’t remember the exact constraints of the process at this point, but that overview which I would have preferred was not available. Reading the commentary I can now understand the wisdom of that, in that it would have allowed some people to flood the evaluations with good or bad judgments. I think that still could have been possible if someone or group was very much inclined to do so. But at least it would have required some patience and effort. So the aspect of random image choice makes sense.

As I’ve mentioned I don’t remember the specifics but I think it was necessary to make an evaluation on each image viewed. The images I did see didn’t appeal to me but I’m reluctant to pass a negative judgment, preferring to abstain and instead praise images that I find interesting. I’m not sure if I had to log off and log back in or exit the process and re-enter, but avoiding negative evaluations wasn’t an easy process. And so I gave up after looking at about five images that I thought were flawed, getting frustrated with the process. Maybe I’m wrong about the process or I missed something but the impression I got was that looking at more than a hundred images would have taken a good part of a day if not longer. I didn’t want to do that, especially if I had to pass negative evaluations on most of the images I did see.

Another problem is that unless every image is viewed beforehand, without evaluation, it’s not possible to get an idea of the range of quality that is available. If only twenty or thirty images are viewed, the best of that group might not be even close to the actual “best.” Any superlatives used may not be worthy, at least in comparison to images not seen. Maybe that was part of my reluctance to pass judgment on the images I did see. Maybe the ones I didn’t care for were among the best. Maybe they were among the “worst.” I had no way to know other than in comparison to may own ability as a photographer and that was obviously a biased view.

I’m inclined to agree with you to a degree about Flickr & JPG mag but they are what they are – primarily social networking sites for photographers to share their images out into the “internet” world not unlike vanity galleries – just cheaper. If you look closely however you will see some inspired and compelling images. I’m willing to bet that if the technology had been around back in the day we would have seen photographers like Atget, Abbott and countless other greats using these sites to self promote their work.