It took a while for me to notice that Flickr provides an analysis of how many times your photos have been looked at. I’ve never expected any of my stuff to have broad appeal, but it’s intriguing to see what people seem to be interested in.
With one exception, this is the fairly stable order of popularity amongst my pictures.
10! I still haven’t seen Patrick Keiller’s London again, so I still don’t know how close I got to guessing the particular location of the forgotten corner of the city that briefly appears in the film. Instead, I relied on Iain Sinclair’s description of finding the same place some years later, somewhere near St Andrew By The Wardrobe.
9! Trainspotters ahoy! The Tube’s inexplicable allure adds a cachet to even the most mundane snapshots.
8! Heh heh, I said ‘faggots’. I’m amazed this one isn’t the most viewed in the entire set, because half of my website traffic consists of kids on MySpace linking to the smaller version on this blog.
7! The promise of violence. Because people like violence. Especially when it’s close enough to enjoy but you’re safely out of the way.
6! The tastefully understated Colloseum photograph. One of very few taken on my holiday in Italy. I can’t help feeling people are mildly disappointed when their searches turn up my photos.
5! See? This is exactly what I mean. This a security guard outside the Sagrada Familia and is tagged accordingly, so I hope people turning up this one are more interested in handcuffs than Gaudi.
4! The only thing more exciting than an old Tube station is a derelict Tube station. Aldwych station, once briefly known as Strand station, is now a ghost station and frequent stand-in for real Underground stations on film and TV.
3! Now here’s the anomaly. A blurry shot at a graduate art show off Brick Lane, which has suddenly rocketed up the charts in only the past week. I have no idea why. Perhaps it’s been discovered by a cabal of Ballardian fetishists who like to pretend this is Rosanna Arquette.
2! A street stall of nested dolls for the tourists in Riga. There’s nothing like Harry Potter, Stalin, and Osama Bin Laden tags to boost the hit rate, although I guess this photo must have disappointed many feverish authors hopefully searching for illustrations for their slash fiction.
1! Ah, the inanimate carbon rod of my photo set! These soothing wood tones and rich timber grain have brightened the desktops of geeks around the world. A pinnacle of repose and tranquility, which I thought had an unassailable lead over the others until the James Spader wannabes turned up.
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