Hans van der Kamp

In the last two years, I have learned that social networking sites as a way of promoting your work can be highly effective. I have often asked myself why and I have come to the conclusion that a regular portfolio website attracts random visitors. On a social networking site however you can choose the people who you want to show your works by befriending them through a geeky link as: “Add as your friend”. You create targeted visitors to your page. Communicating through the “Send Message” options on these site is more effective too, because your e-mail will not end up in a long list of SPAM e-mails.

Most of you already know this, but for me it was a revelation, because I had always laughed at sites as MySpace.com or that horrible Dutch clone Hyves.nl. I thought of these sites as yet another progressive step in a society that longs for a virtual economy, virtual money, virtual friendship and virtual happiness. I still look at it that way and I can hardly stop laughing when a complete stranger on a networking site approaches me in a PM with the line: “My dear friend!”

But it works.

There is one big disadvantage for people like me who photograph people as they are/ Without their clothes on, I mean. There are highly complicated rules about depictions of nudity. A nice male ass is fine, showing male nipples is okay too, but showing female nipples will get your page deleted. To fully understand what was done and was not done on these sites I had to go back to my childhood memories of a huge sign with rules and regulations hammered to the wall next to our one and only local swimming pool. (But I kept wondering why a naked male behind was not censored.)

I could not handle that. I saw an artist with 1049 friends/subscribers who had his page deleted by a desk clerk. The work was perfectly harmless. I have no idea how much time he spent whoring himself to get to that amount of connections but it broke my heart to see him restore that same page and censoring his own images only to have this new page deleted once again a month or two later.

So, I looked around for open source code, did some designing and in a few days my Networking Site For Photographers, Artists, Models, Collectors and Friends will see the light of day. Being quite busy with photography lately I wonder if I can find the time to actually promote the site, but I will do my best.

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