"Pinterest Path"
Networks are intricate and bring about community, organization, ideas, inspiration, information, and images. Social networks have played a huge role in the art world and in my own personal approach to displaying my work to a larger audience. Pinterest has been one of my favorite online database networks due to the abundance of images that freely flow and get passed along rapidly. I started a pinterest board called hopefolio with photos that I have taken and edited. As an artist my intention was for my photos to be seen and for there to be a response. Soon other pinners began to re-pin my images and a chain and connection began. The network of my photographs began to grow. Once one person re-pinned a photo, someone could then re-pin it onto another board and so on. I discovered that I could see who posted my photos where and I was quite amused and surprised to see where they were ending up. For this project I decided to visually map three of my own personal photos in three different ways. The photo from a maternity shoot got re-pinned onto 3 boards with names like maternity and photography. On these other boards I found images that were similar and mapped them close to the original photo, then photos that were straying from the original one but still on the same board as mine go towards the outside. For the second image of a butterfly, the images on the left of the original photo are from a board that was based on butterflies. The images on the right was on a completely different board titled Big Sur. I mapped the change and the ways my image was interpreted through these different networks of people. The third photo of the girl I followed a stream of boards, first clicking on my spiritual self, then the first pin on that to the board Ellen Love, then Color the mind, which changed to Color my World, changing instantly to Animal Photography. This map of connections showed me that in just a few clicks my own work was translated in a sense. People enjoyed a photo and re-pinned it somewhere where another person would add it to their collection, this created a chain of events. The first photo being an artistic photo of a girl and the last being a playful kitten.