Thomas Hawk Digital Connection

Yesterday while wandering around and photographing San Francisco’s Tenderloin District I was surprised to see the gates to Cohen Alley off of Ellis Street open for the first time in as long as I can remember. Cohen Alley, which used to be one of the most filth, drug and crime infested alleys in one of the worst areas of San Francisco, has recently been renovated, reclaimed and renamed the Tenderloin National Forest complete with gardens and public art and the transformation has been nothing short of remarkable.

Tomorrow, the alley will officially open to the general public from 10am to 9pm with a day of celebration featuring numerous Bay Area artists and performers. According to the Tenderloin National Forest’s website, the public art and garden space was created to address the lack of green space in the Tenderloin. The Forest is intended to be an inspiration and model for others to attempt gardening in the inner city.

Darryl Smith, co-founder of the Tenderloin National Forest, along with two public murals from the garden.

From the Forest’s website: “The high concentration of apartment buildings in the Tenderloin gives it the densest population (people per square mile) in the city, and also the highest proportion of families and children. It is also one of the poorest, with a median family income of around $20K, a figure that is less half the overall city average. The area has a large number of immigrants from Asia, Southeast Asia and Latin America, and the 2004 demographic summary stated that the Tenderloin is home to the city’s entire Cambodian population.”

I spoke with one of the co-leading artists for this project Darryl Smith yesterday and he shared with me a number of the stories behind the art in the alley. There is a wonderful stone walkway in the alley created by Portuguese muralist Rigo, who has done several other large scale public installations in the City. There are some great murals there also done by Trust Your Struggle. In addition to lots of other public art works there is a fish pond and an oven to bake bread in the garden.

Smith told me that after Saturday’s opening the Forest would be open regularly from 12 noon to 5pm every weekday. If you get a chance definitely check it out. It’s an amazingly positive space happening in an otherwise pretty rough neighborhood. I’ve got a small set of images that I took of the alley yesterday here.

Smith also told me that two of the adjacent buildings to the alley provide community housing for low-income residents and added that one of the housing units will also include housing for an artist residency program where artists can live there and work at the National Forest and on projects for brief periods of time.

Recently when my Flickr photostream hit 20,000 images I blogged a post about my 20,000th image on Flickr. I got a number of messages though from people telling me that I’d done my math wrong, that I hadn’t actually hit my 20,000th image. I was surprised by these notes and so I logged out of Flickr myself and sure enough, when not logged in, my Flickrstream showed five less images than I saw when I was logged in.

So earlier today I posted in the Flickr Help Forum about this to see if someone from Flickr Staff could explain why my stream showed five less images than it should. It turns out the answer to this was easier than I thought and that I could use the Flickr Organizer to see if any of my photos had been marked as “Restricted” images by Flickr.

It turns out that five of my images on Flickr were actually marked “Restricted,” the five images that you see above.

The first of the images of mine censored by Flickr is of a sculpture that sits in the middle of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It’s public art approved by the City of Beverly Hills and seen by thousands of children every year. Unfortunately Flickr deems the image too risque for the public view and has instead chosen to censor it.

The second image of mine censored is of a painting by artist Mel Ramos that hangs in the Oakland Museum of California. Again, a public museum visited by children every single week of the year.

The third image of mine censored by Flickr is of a screenshot of the Flickr Blog announcing the Yahoo acquisition of Flickr from back in 2004 stating, “…but we’re going to stay true to our vision and to the people who made us what we are — that’s you, the Flickr pioneers…” The post was critical of Flickr who many feel have not stayed “true” to their original vision.

The fourth image of mine censored is a screenshot of an interview that I did with the website Black Star Rising.

The fifth image of mine censored is a screenshot I took of a Flickr Help Forum post when Flickr reversed their decision to cap the number of contacts you were allowed to have at Flickr at 5,000.

What bothers me as much as the censorship at Flickr is the fact that when you are censored at Flickr there is really no way to know. When you are censored at Flickr it is done by some nameless faceless Yahoo staffer. You are not notified that you were censored. You are not given a chance to object to the censorship. You are just quietly censored and they hope you won’t notice.

As much as I love Flickr and enjoy using the service I’ve long been critical of the rampant censorship that continues to take place on the site and object to the images in my photostream being marked “Restricted” by Flickr staff. Certainly there may be some things that Flickr should mark as restricted — pornography, hate images, etc, but restricting public fine art paintings and sculpture or screenshot posts that are critical of Flickr should not be how they use their censorship tool. And even when they feel that stuff should be censored, I think that Flickr owes the community at least some sort of notification that their images are and have been censored and why, with an opportunity to appeal or object.

If you’d like to see if Flickr is censoring any of your images as well, go to the Flickr Organizer and click on “more options” under the search function and then tell the organizer to show you only “Restricted” content. You might just be surprised that Flickr has censored some of your images as well.

Update: Flickr has uncensored 4 of my 5 images that they were censoring now. I’m working on trying to get the remaining image uncensored as well. I’m also hoping that Flickr will agree to notify people in the future if they censor their work. I think that’s only fair. The Flickr Help Forum thread above is a long one and worth reading if this is an area that interests you. One of the things debated in the thread is the question as to why it is ok on Flickr to publish photographs of male nude sculpture (like Michelangelo’s David) which clearly show male genitalia, but it is not ok to publish photos of female sculpture that show genitalia. Personally I don’t think any photographs of sculpture on Flickr should be censored, but they have not agreed to that point yet.