Demand and Supply

Photography has come  a long way since it was invented over one and a half centuries ago. Photographs are produced and consumed for private, professional and artistic purposes. When you think of photographs as a product for visual consumption (memories, decoration, entertainment, documentation etc.) you can also look at them from an economic perspective, namely in terms of demand and supply.

Two years ago, I went for the first time to the infamous Oktoberfest, being the world’s largest folk festival. For three weeks, it’s all about beer and things that quickly get related to that. As you might know, it has become a fashion during this event (though it is not a tradition!) for men to wear leather trousers and for woman to wear dresses called “Dirndl”. As you can well imagine when seing the image of a Dirndl above, it atracts a lot more attention than those leather trousers.

After taking this image I went home (surprisingly sober) and uploaded this photo to my Flickr account. I entitled it “an experiment“. By adding the “right” tags as I did with this post, within 24 hours, with 400 clicks it got 4 times as many hits as any other of my pictures on Flickr during that time. With over 2000 hits so far, it remains my most viewed picture online. Thanks to analytical applications, I can see what keywords people were searching for until they found my picture. I am not blaming anyone, it’s just natural: there is a gigantic demand online for breasts. Something as trashy as this picture that I found on flickr (click) has gotten 12000 clicks, though it was only tagged with “cheese, boobs, halloween”.

Despite the blandness, I was always convinced that this is a wonderful photo. I would like to thank everyone contributing to this ongoing experiment, particularly if you clicked on the image to see it in full size.