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@patdavid, over in this thread: Naked/nude/etc photography you posted a suggestion to cool off/change topic, right after a post that I had made. Then you closed the thread, again right after I post that I made.

The first time you warned about staying on topic, and yet said nothing when @anon41087856 went back off topic. The second time was just now, when I did my best to explain to @beachbum yet again that whatever he thought I was talking about, that wasn’t it. He got to make his post. The thread was closed when I responded.

I was in the process of composing a reponse to more interesting stuff, starting with responding to your post about “connection” and whether male and female photographers might have different points of view - I don’t know, but it seems there aren’t many women on the pixls.us forum, though perhaps they all very wisely chose user names that don’t give much clue as to gender.

I also wanted to respond to the Mario Sorrenti’s photographs of Ashley Graham, which have a heroic quality about them though the particular one you posted isn’t my favorite and it would have been interesting to ask you why that particular image stood out for you and to share which of the images I thought were “best” of the lot.

I also wanted to respond to @Jacal 's post about Marina Abramović, which directly addresses the question of connection between people, and also to @Reptorian’s and @anon41087856’s reactions to the 500 men project which I found their respective (and I think very different) reactions very intriguing - to me the images just look like the sort of images that might be captured in a setting where nakedness per se isn’t automatically associated with sex.

I wanted to link @Stampede’s “abstract legs” to the more abstract of the two images he posted from that art gallery, suggesting that somehow he was using his camera to close the circle from “realistic pre-camera” to cameras being used to make images that look like paintings, to cameras doing the task of capturing reality faster/better than artists, to abstract art as a reaction to the camera, to using the camera to make abstract art.

And I wanted to talk about the Judy Dater image of Imogen and Twinka, with its allegorical/mythic undertones and how it’s a photograph that has puzzled me for many years, but no-one seemed interested in that image.

Now why did I start this “Thread closed” post? In threads where “anonymous” was posting, it happened at least twice that I tried to answer his sillier points and object to his language and suddenly someone stepped into stop the posts right after I made a post, leaving me wondering what invisible line I stepped across, when anonymous was allowed to keep saying really not nice stuff but my response led to a stopping of the thread.

I let that slide wrt to “anonymous”. But now the same thing has happened again and at this point I’m feeling a bit silenced here on the pixls.us forum and inclined to do now what I was planning to do at some point in the near future anyway, which is once and for all unsubscribe from this forum. And no, this isn’t an invitation for anyone to say “oh, please don’t go”, though perhaps nobody would anyway :slight_smile: .

My apologies to everyone for starting the silly “nude photography” post in the first place. My husband and I read through my initial post together to ensure that no males would feel like the post constituted an attack, because I really didn’t want to deal with male photographers feeling defensive about their work. But obviously we failed.

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Yikes, I didn’t realize you were composing a response! :frowning: I certainly wouldn’t have closed the topic at that point if I knew it. I’m very sorry! Please don’t misconstrue this as directed at you posting personally, just that sometimes it helps to walk away from a topic for a little bit to let things cool off (I absolutely sucked at doing this in the past, and it drained way more energy from me than it should have).

This is miles away from how I want you to feel, and I hope you can believe me that it’s literally the opposite of how I want anyone to feel here (mostly). :smiley: Your contributions are appreciated!

So:

  1. I’m sorry if I cut you off while responding - I didn’t mean to. That’s my fault, and it was not intended in any way to reflect on you personally - just a mistake on my part.
  2. I would love to continue a discussion on the Graham shoot, or the 500 men project, or even better, @Stampede’s current work with abstract legs, which I think is neat.

Once Nazi’s are involved, the thread has likely veered too far away from the original intent.

Would you be willing to start a new thread about the Judy Dater image where we can start discussing it?

I’ll start a new thread on the Sorrenti shoot and maybe try to document my reasons for choosing that particular image from the set. I’d love to hear what others liked and what their thoughts are.

I can try to start a @Stampede abstract legs topic as well, but I haven’t quite put my finger on the things I like about it yet (though I do like them).

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+1 (Godwin Point)

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The pictures of the 500 men project don’t to justice to the subjects depicted. The light work is poor, it looks to me that she wanted her revenge on men by doing unflattering pics of them. Well, she succeeded. That’s a poor job.

I wish we could speak of nudes without ever saying the word “sex”. That’s the main reason I’m not that interested in talking about that on the internets.

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People involved in the thread had disparate views on the subject of nudity and sexuality, which is fine. Making pointed remarks about others that don’t really go anywhere except to say they suck because they don’t share the same views is an irritant at best. We are all adults here (I think).

I can see why @Elle’s post rubbed people the wrong way. Many of the articles she linked, which I didn’t have time to read unfortunately, came from publications that lean hard in a certain direction and tend to churn out content that is either provocative or click-bait depending on your perspective on contemporary journalism and the political platforms they represent.

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This is Godwin’s Law
“As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1”

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Has nobody noticed that @beachbum is the person who brought up Nazis, in his initial post, which was also the first post to the thread I started?

Given the dictum that “it’s too late when Nazis are brought into the thread”, the thread should have been closed at that point, right after @beachbum’s initial post.

Or are you all saying that it’s OK for @beachbumn to drag Nazis into the conversation but not OK for me to respond to the absurdity of him dragging Nazis into the discussion?

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As a moderator, I’d like to let the conversation go on slightly too long rather than forcibly cut the conversation too early; that is just my own personal style. I am certainly open to change, and I can just start closing things when I think they’re going to go badly, instead of when they’ve actually gone badly (though I don’t really want to do that because I don’t think its a good idea).

What I’d really rather see, personally, is that the mention of Nazi’s just get ignored, because we collectively seem to agree that it is a ridiculous comparison, and then the thread could’ve (potentially) continued to some useful end.

We have a choice to acknowledge and engage, and while I understand that the internet pushes us towards debating every single tiny point, I’d love to see us pick and choose which points to respond to and which to just ignore. I am certainly guilty many times of engaging when I shouldn’t, and it takes a lot of self control not to, but I’m working on it, and I’d hope that everyone else would too.

Just so we’re clear: I don’t think the thread was closed because of a specific person, but rather because we all collectively choose to engage and the thread devolved into something that was not useful or on topic.

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As a rhetorical device, metaphor relies a lot on cultural and even moral perspective to communicate an idea. The limited bandwidth of an internet forum makes the application of such even more precarious, given the usually wide and diverse audience.

I was reminded of such earlier today, when I effectively told @Claes not to ‘code’; where I meant, not to have a heart-attack about my attempted use of RawTherapee, he instead stopped writing C++ talked about old programmers… :smiley:

“Nazis as metaphor” may make a poignant point, but is fraught with all sorts of side-effects…

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OK @Elle

Has nobody noticed that @beachbum is the person who brought up Nazis, in his initial post, which was also the first post to the thread I started?

Given the dictum that “it’s too late when Nazis are brought into the thread”, the thread should have been closed at that point, right after @beachbum’s initial post.

Or are you all saying that it’s OK for @beachbum to drag Nazis into the conversation but not OK for me to respond to the absurdity of him dragging Nazis into the discussion?

I just checked, this is what I typed:

America is more afraid of sexuality than of guns. You are allowed to publish Nazi propaganda everywhere, but beware of a female nipple - that’s obscene! Guns are in every TV-show, 50% of films show people getting killed, none shows people getting made.

Yes, I used the four letters that compose the syllable “Nazi” but I applied it in “Nazi propaganda”. Right now I believe that you don’t see any difference at all, but that doesn’t really say anything about me, does it? My point was the discrepancy between violence in ANY possible way being OK in the media but the human body or - beware - sexuality being totally taboo and forbidden.

I know you still don’t get it.

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What does “OK @Elle” mean?

Does anyone have any clue what @beachbum is talking about?

The topic was photographs of naked people. Examples that I gave included Cunningham, Steiglitz, and several more recent photographers.

@beachbum - I don’t know why you went off the deep end about violence, various anti-American statements, your desire to not photograph men, your relationship with your wife, your “love” of your models for 90 minutes, and etc, etc., etc. I’m guessing somehow you felt threatened/upset about something. But I don’t have a clue what or why.

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My links included one blog, one museum, two photographer’s websites, google image search, three newspapers, three online magazines, and petapixel, which is a sort of photography news website:

@afre - my apologies for asking. But which of these sites are click-bait and which are “provocative” because they “lean hard” one way or another and so for one of these two reasons might have “rubbed people the wrong way”? Or did you mean some of the other sites that I linked? In which case, could you please let me know which links might have offended people on the forum by virtue of being click-bait and which by leaning some particular direction or another?

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@Elle After re-reading the quote, I should apologize for the hyperbole. It comes from a place of exhaustion from being bombarded by political and social diatribe.

To be clear, I said that an article is either provocative or click bait, depending on one’s perspective. I will refrain from talking about leanings since I want to keep the peace here. What I would say is that publications, and the average person nowadays, tend to take sides, and have audiences and writers who subscribe to and condemn certain schools of thought. Naturally, one’s reading list would gravitate toward that which he or she would find agreeable. The fact that your links alone sparked controversy and subsequently a locked thread suggests that people had strong feelings about them. (Feel free to message me if you want to discuss further. :slight_smile:)

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For this purpose, discourse, the excellent software on which this forum runs, provides a feature that allows you to close a topic for a specified period of time.

To prevent such mishaps, you can turn presence enabled on in site settings.

(I have not followed the discussion in the closed thread in detail nor the one here, so this is just a quick note not intended to take sides or comment contentwise)

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We do have presence enabled, but I may not have noticed it (multitasking is a lie). :slight_smile:

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Actually you didn’t say the articles were provocative or click bait. You said many of the articles “came from publications” that were provocative or click bait. You also said that you hadn’t actually read the articles, so I’m not sure how you could have actually meant the articles even though you said “publications”.

So my question remains, but I’ll try to rewrite it to make answering easier:

Of the articles I linked to in my original post, which come from “publications” that “churn out content that is either provocative or click-bait”? For convenience, here’s the list of “publications” again:

Or if all of the above sites churn out content that’s provocative or click-bait depending on one’s perspective, do you have any examples of sites that don’t publish any provocative articles/don’t churn out click-bait “depending on one’s perspective”?

This may seem like I’m pressing a point beyond all reason. But it seems to me that the idea is that anyone posting anything to the pixls forum should make sure that any links they give aren’t from sites that might offend people. And I don’t know of any such sites. So a list or some guidelines as to “surely won’t offend anyone” would be handy.

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Okay, I don’t think you will be satisfied with my responses because the point of my involvement was to ground the conversation, not to derail it. Perhaps I was careless in my diction or too effective in my hyperbole. Perhaps it is my beef with the quality of journalism I see nowadays. Really, it is less about you and more about how you were perceived. I hope you would stop being so critical of every single word that I write. It is a part of my disability; it takes time for me to express myself well. Let me re-frame my approach.

What I have been trying to say is that your thread (now closed) looked like a direct response to @beachbum’s, which is fine. However, my impression was that it was taken as a personal attack or at least an extension of the strong disagreements started in the former thread.

As said in my post that you don’t like very much, it was unfortunate that I couldn’t read your articles. I really wanted to and usually follow your links with anticipation. (Remember, I am a fan of yours :stuck_out_tongue:.) I was merely pointing out that the contention had to do with the fact that the subject matter was contrarian to those with whom you were arguing. That what is of interest to the publishers is different from their tastes.

Another problem is one that I have pointed out in the past. Your responses tend to be long form, which could be construed as overwhelming (or even aggressive or condescending, depending on people’s reactions). Shortening them with bullet points might help but bullet points could be seen as condescending as well if there are a lot of them.

With regard to publications, the goal of journalism is to be provocative, relevant and meaningful; but there is also provocative done poorly; whether it is or not is quite subjective. It can also be click bait; whether it is or not is even more subjective.

My take on the idea of click bait is that it is declared so by people who disagree with the contents of the article or more generally with the publication’s approach or stance because of some bias (sometimes actual, sometimes perceived), and henceforth dismissed as rubbish. It can be used as a term of dismissal and derision. Again, I am not talking about you and your articles per se, just the perception of them by their titles and publishers.

I don’t think there ought to be any guidelines to censor stuff. It is just that in the context of the previous discussions your thread and its links didn’t come across as neutral. I would advise that you keep your posts shorter and maybe split them into manageable chucks so that you could allow other people to speak.

While in University, people told me that I talked too much at once and that I was rude and wasn’t listening to them. I wasn’t doing anything of the sort but I was so passionate and so loving of the person and subject that I tended to speak deeply and also listen deeply, which gave others the impression that I wanted to do all of the talking, which wasn’t the intention. I understand that intent is even harder to do on the Internet.

I am not interested in continuing this discussion but I hope this post clarifies a few things.

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