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‹ Photo Notes · 15 ledna, 2012
You may have noticed that yesterday, 24 August 2010, not only all my photographs but also the so-called „fan page“ and my personal profile disappeared from Facebook. All contributions, contacts and private mail are tied to it. A few things to fix, but if one doesn’t rely on a public service, it is no tragedy.
There is no point reproaching the Facebook administrators; they only do their job the way they do it, they react to the complaints of their users.
In fact I held out for a long time. Friends occasionally complained that their photographs were being deleted and sometimes made bets on how many minutes a new shot would last on Facebook. From the start it was clear that the informer is some „colleague“, quite possibly one of the „friends“. He does it in an effort to harm, but it doesn’t occur to him that to all the „damaged“ photographers he in fact does a unique service – advertising. Since he lacks the courage to show himself and remains anonymous, I want to thank him at least this way.
In the morning I received two e-mails from Facebook saying that I had uploaded a photograph with inappropriate content and that it had been deleted. Nothing more; you don’t find out who objected to it, nor which photograph actually broke the rules. That is a bit different from other sites, where you know exactly which photograph it was about. After lunch a third one disappeared and nothing else happened. At six in the evening everything was fine; when I got home around eleven, my Facebook account no longer existed. Facebook didn’t comment on the situation at all. Let’s not be surprised, we are part of the matrix, where the bigger someone is, the more he can do as he pleases.
As I wrote, nothing tragic is happening, just a bit more work; new photographs for Facebook will be „treated“ so as not to provoke, whoever liked to visit the fan page will find it again, whoever wants to find a contact to me will find it too, and not only on Facebook. I note that these are the same photographs that ordinary society magazines and the like print without problem, and they speak of them as art, not pornography.
And what else did that person, in his effort to harm, cause? He awakened sleeping people to curiosity, solidarity, to new interest. New people latched on to it who perhaps until then had no idea about my work. The traffic of this site jumped by tens of percent, and they are mostly people who came straight from Facebook. I am not sure whether that is exactly what he intended by his act, but in any case I cannot help thanking him for it.
If the reason for his actions is really envy, I want to assure him that there is nothing to envy in the years of purposeful and not always easy work of mine and my real colleagues, although work that we all probably love. I can only advise him not to waste his time and energy on stupidities and to try to work fully on himself; maybe he will find some fulfilment and maybe one day he will even laugh at some future cowardly aspirant for whom the results of his work will be worth reporting anonymously as „inappropriate content“. By his effort he in fact shows that he takes an interest in his work and is, even if in the negative sense of the word, his fan.
New address of the Facebook page – http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jiri-Ruzek-Photography/148544905174116
New address of the personal FB profile – http://www.facebook.com/jiri.ruzek1