I’m feeling slightly guilty about Flickr. I’m a big fan, but have recently deserted it somewhat for the sly charms of facebook. Which is as much of an apology as it is a confession – I held out against the ‘book for the longest time, but now, as is generally the way with these things, I’m quite, quite obsessed. And so, it seems, are many of my friends – we all seemed to take part in a sort of lemming-like dash towards the cliffacebook at the same time, as though on some unspoken cue. I don’t know who started it, guv, I was just there and all of a sudden we went mad, like. And now I feel like I’m having an affair with a crazy young society party girl, this whirl of events and flirty remarks, glimpses into impossibly impressive lives. The last time that happened Things Did Not End Well for me, so I really should know better, but there it is.
Anyway.
For all its charms and ability to share photos of people doing shots of tequila/dressing up in eighties gear/having picnics in London parks, what facebook hasn’t got, and which Flickr is still the unrivalled champion of, is the endlessly fascinating world of What’s In My Bag.
What’s In My Bag (sometimes tagged What’s In Your Bag) is, for those who haven’t yet discovered the phenomenon, not too difficult to explain. Basically, it’s exactly what is says on the tin – a photograph of the photographer’s bag and its content.
Generally that means a day bag - a handbag or its male equivalent - and arranged beside it, things like books, ipods, phones, keys, wallets, contact lenses, bottles of water, makeup, pens, sunglasses and so on.
And there are literally thousands of these photos. They look like dissected creatures, the bags themselves deflated and hollow, their internals often neatly laid out beside them, each one meticulously tagged and annotated for reference, the miles of earphone intestines, the Ray-Ban eyeballs, the 50cl Evian heart.
Mostly the removed organs are identikit – ipods are fairly ubiquitous, as are keys and phones and wallets and so on. The titles of books obviously vary – though they tend to be suspiciously hip – Chuck Palahniuk appears frequently, as does Kurt Vonnegut, though perhaps it’s fitting that meta fiction and meta photography go hand in hand. I suspect that there’s a degree of editing that goes on with these photos in general though, whether that’s in adding the impressive or removing the mediocre. But every so often you find a bag with a genuine, if unintended, story – in amongst the Palms and the Nokias and the Moleskines and the MAC lipglosses will be something that speaks more about the owner than everything else put together: a preponderance of sanitising products suggesting incipient OCD; one too many photographs of a girl/boyfriend hinting at a clingy neurosis; a collection of charms, tokens and mascots indicating an individual who has long since strayed into the realms of unreason, though they may not yet, if ever, know it. Happy bags are less interesting.
Anyway. I don’t know where it came from, this exhibitionistic need to reveal one’s material self. In fact, on the face of it, it seems kind of strange – advertising your valuables for the world to see. After all, any one of the bags on Flickr contains I’d say an average of £500’s worth of gear – enterprising muggers could in theory select their targets in the comfort of their own home.
But what’s weirder is the possibility that it’s a meme not prompted by pride at all, but rather fear – the consequence of living in a post 9/11 world, a need to protest your innocence.
Because Semtex, Sarin, and Anthrax are rarely tagged on Flickr.
