I was glancing through the statistics page of my Flickr account the other day when I noticed that I had just passed two million views. That feels like quite something for someone with limited photographic ability and maybe a narrow range of interests, or at least a narrow range of places visited and photographed. I have been with the photo sharing site since 2008, started paying for its hosting services in 2010, and to date have published 18,665 images and 44 videos. So that’s around one thousand photos per year, and an average of 107 views per photo (the most viewed photo, of the stacks at the British Newspaper Library at its former home in Colindale, has had 48,461 visits since 2013). People are viewing.
But what is a view? Views are one of those much-cited but unclear measures of success for an internet service that appears on the statistics of those to which you subscribe. Technically it means every time a page on a site is loaded or reloaded in a browser. There are all sorts of other means for measuring engagement with a site, such as time spent on a page (dwell time), number of pages visited, scrolling activity, clicking on links, returning to a page, and so on, which are used as means to report success if not actually to reflect it. That’s because the machines can track our behaviour, but not yet read our minds. The machines do not know what a view is; what it is that we see, why we see it, what it imparts to us, nor the time necessary for any of these things to register with us – and to what degree. The one thing an view statistic cannot tell us is what is our view.
There have been attempts by scientists, psychologists and theoreticians to look more precisely at how we view, such as through the use of eye-tracking software that can record where our eyes settle over an image. Such work has generated much excitement among some in film studies – read the late David Bordwell’s post The eye’s mind, for more on this. Where the eye settles over an image, still or moving (though moving brings in extra complexity), depends on who we are and what, literally, we are looking for.
Moreover, we will track an image about which we have been told nothing differently to an image about which we have been informed, or have had questions posed that lead us to investigate the image more closely. But of course an image is something composed, rather than ordinary reality for which our eyes have been trained to comprehend over millions of years. Purposefully or not, an image is shaped, simply by being in a particular shape (usually rectangular), which must direct our view. Of course, as Bordwell points out, there is camera movement and for most moving images sound that must further direct what we see. Still images do their work in stillness and silence.
Every photograph that I have taken, no matter how badly, has been composed. I wanted to shape the view. But I could not control it. The view is, ultimately, what I did not see. The view is in the eye of the beholder, whose job it is to make the image meaningful to themselves. Of course there is much commonality in how we view things, which is why certain images become hugely popular, or at least familiar. Seeing things in the way that others see them must be an important part of how our brains work. It’s one more survival mechanism built up over those million of years. But the view must ultimately be defined by its individuality.
The other things about the view is its speed. I doubt that few of those two million pairs of eyes have spent too long over any one of my images. Unless they were looking for particular visual information, say for personal or research reasons, they are likely to have given the image a few seconds’ glance at most. That was all that was needed. This never fails to fascinate me, how much we can take in so quickly. Again, it must be at root another survival technique inherited from our prehistoric ancestors, taking in what we need as quickly as possible before that sabre-toothed tiger lurking in the undergrowth is able to leap out and make a meal of us.
The view concentrates our mind, or is an expression of the concentrated mind. It requires effort; its reward is recognition. Fleeting as they may have been, those two million glances each achieved something – they caught the eye. What the eyes saw I cannot know, but each time it was meaningful. So I rejoice in the inability of machines to quantify quality, while feeling pleased about the numbers anyway. That’s my view.
A few favourite images from 2008 to the end of last year accompany this post, with links to their Flickr pages.
