I am a keen photographer.

I’ve been contributing to with some of my pictures to Unsplash for a while.

Last summer one of them got ‘famous’.

Here’s a brief story about what happened, a few things that I’ve learned from it and a small reflection sparked by it.

Let’s start.

That time I got ‘famous’.

This story starts early this Summer when discussing with some colleagues at work I casually mentioned that — with the Pandemic happening and all that, I’d started to spend some of the time at home editing few of my older pictures and publishing them online on the free platform Unsplash. Just for fun. Then one person asked me: “so, what do you get out of this? Is anyone even looking at them?”

Now — I have a confession to make: I am a little bit of a data geek; give me a ‘stats’ or ‘analytics’ tab and I’ll dive right into every little obscure corner of it. Knowing this, it should no longer be a surprise for you to know that of course I knew exactly how many views my pictures had and so I nonchalantly replied: “Actually, quite a few people see them, I get on average around 2,000 views per day. That’s not that bad. Actually let me check how many views I got today”.

Wait. What? 2,5 Million views in the last couple of days? How did that even happen?

Before we move forward, here’s the second part of my confession. There’s is nothing a data person loves more that something unexpected happening in the data. What I was witnessing here was a major change, a spike, a signal from the noise! For God’s sake, this is what we have all been waiting for!

Okay, let’s calm down and reflect. What is happening exactly? Is this even real? There must be an error somewhere.

Incidentally, welcome to the four stages of a nerd discovering something new: excitement, disbelief, denial and self-doubt followed by either despair for having made a mistake somewhere or genuine curiosity for what is happening.

As it turns out what was happening was pretty simple: for some unknown, magical, reason, the Almighty Algorithm had picked up one of my pictures and distributed it to one of Unsplash partners — Trello and there it was picked up again and was featured as the number one option for setting a background picture in a new board.

Here it was: I had made it. I was, unquestionably, famous.

Well, as we shall see later on, not really.

The things I’ve learned.

Keep going at it.

This is quite obvious. I have a few picture on Unsplash and had been posting on the platform for around one year before all this happened. In most of this time nothing happened. Like, nothing. Ever.

But, when it did happen: at least there was some ‘meat to the bone’. Some extra material to support the construction of this newly formed structure of fame, some good old supporting act for my main star, some strong gregarious cyclist to help carry my whole team forward.

Makes sense, no? Well, again, as it turns out, not really.

Fame is neither far nor even.

My immediate curiosity was to see if all new traffic was spilling over to the rest of my pictures. Were people coming from this one image going on to look at the others?

*The sad truth of the rest of my portfolio not getting much love.*

Nope. They did not. This whole fame business is very uneven. The rest of my images saw almost no difference following this whole spike. Basically I live in a world where my team Capitan gets literally 91%+ of the glory.

Well, good job that was at least my best picture. Right?

What you think has (almost) no value.

I really do not like that picture. I think it’s over exposed, over edited, not well framed and the colors are weird. I’ve uploaded it out of pure laziness. I had worked on it, I needed one extra picture to get to 10 in my submission, I picked that one for the sake of not having to work on another one. That’s the truth. Yet, it does not matter.

When you produce something with some remote artistic quality- or anything that requires a ‘taste’ for its enjoyment, it really does not matter what you think.

Well, almost.

*One of my other pictures which I personally like much more than the ‘famous’ one.*

The whole point, I think, it’s to produce something that you can be reasonably proud of (or maybe just not ashamed by?) and then let the others deicide if it’s worthy of their attention or not.

Who are you to decide what people will like. It’s the Internet, remember? Anyone can do anything, yet, you have to trust the fact that the ‘best’ will, maybe — and this is a very large maybe unfortunately, emerge by itself though a combination of luck and momentum.

Your job as a creative person, as a creator, in my option, is to try to be prepared for it when the wave comes.

Once something is on the Internet is beyond your control.

Okay, so we have established that this picture somehow got a ton of views. That is nice. Also, it was downloaded, apparently, more than 35,000 times. Whoa, that’s a big number. I wonder what people do with it.

*Me Googling what happened - oh so millennial.*

As it turns out, right click on the image and you can do a Google Search for it. Here’s what you’ll find: a mix of personal blogs, meditation and finance gurus (do these two go together?), companies selling all sort of services, television screens, wallpapers boards and YouTube videos. That’s all good.

My learning here it is very simple.

You cannot stop something once it’s on the Internet.

There is no ‘undo’ button here. This image is gone now, it is no longer mine. It belongs to the network and it will show up in the most unexpected places.

And that’s largely okay.

Largely.

Amongst the endless stream of search results I’ve found two that I found interesting.

*Some unexpected places where my picture ended up selling salvation and Cannabis.*

A Christian website and other one selling Cannabis products.

Now, I do not want to make a judgment here but both of these topics can be pretty divisive, they are somehow ‘charged’ and controversial.

In this particular instance, I do think both of these websites are fine but this got me thinking. What if my image was on a different kind of website? What if? Maybe one spreading misinformation or hate speech, maybe worst?

It’s a picture of a mountain, that’s fair. I don’t think it would lend itself very well to violence-inciting groups. But. How would I feel about it if it did? How would I react if my image was on the poster of a political candidate I oppose? What if it was promoting something I really, strongly, stand against? Is my image an endorsement?

It is, at then end, attached to my real name.

So what?

I don’t have an answer to these questions. I don’t think anyone does.

Is the person making the knife responsible for the killing? I get it, this is hardly the same thing.

An image has many more positive uses that — for example, a weapon. But, still.

We live in a world were we constantly and mindlessly make things and share them. Our face is in countless selfies and pictures with strangers, our name in countless pages and maybe our kids are dancing on a meme as we speak.

Don’t get me wrong. I largely like this culture. I was born in 1983, I literally grew up with the Internet. With the dream of a society where access to knowledge was free, endless and decentralized. I could not wait to contribute to it. To offer my proverbial two cents.

Again, nothing that happened here is bad, per se. I like my picture promoting wellbeing and I don’t mind if it helps someone tell a story to promote their arts school or outdoor living website. I just ended up thinking these type of questions should be at least discussed. I am a Millennial, after all, the only think I like more than being online is overthinking things.

As an end to this: I appreciate the irony of posting a reflection on User Generated Content on a User Generated website. A meta-reflection of sorts. But, hey, what can we do. It’s just the Internet and that’s the way it works.

Right?

5 things I’ve learned about the Internet when my picture got viral

That time I got ‘famous’.