the writing and photography of Neil Kramer
“New York is the type of place where you need make your own life. Â If you get divorced, you go to the park and chat it up with lonely women eating their store-bought salads. Â If you are unemployed, you put on a nice jacket from the Men’s Warehouse and hit the pavement. Â You have to act like a winner in this town, because the city despises losers more than rats or Republicans.”
As I revealed yesterday, I had started to gather up photos of many of you. I am still searching for those missing from the list. A few of you don’t have Flickr accounts, so I’ll just have to imagine what you look like, unless I figure out another way to steal your photo.  I didn’t hear any complaints about this little project of mine, so I am proceeding with it. Tonight, I added a few more faces to this prestigious collection of blogger mugs shots.
I just made a Flickr slideshow of all the faces. How cool. All these bloggers, passing before me, one after another, right on my monitor. These are the smiles and eyes of individuals who I know mostly through words.
But do I know the real you? If I didn’t have these photographs, I would walk right past you on the street. You might seem familiar for a second, but I wouldn’t assume that I knew you from blogging. I would more likely think that I remember you from an episode of “All My Children” last year, where I would wrongly peg you as the actor playing Erica Kane’s new cook.
Perhaps it is better that I don’t know the “real” you. This gives me the freedom to write whatever I want on this blog. I never have to see your reaction to anything I say. I don’t have to see you rolling your eyes in dismay or shaking your head in disappointment.
All these faces. Men and women with families, with significant others. People at work. At home. At school. At conferences. Dressed up. Dressed down. In New York. In Canada. In Arizona. You are actually REAL PEOPLE.
REAL PEOPLE!
Oh my God, and I sit here sometimes writing about things like… my penis. You are REAL PEOPLE reading this. You are sitting in your living room, reading this!
This photo idea was a bad one. It is better not to know that you are real.  Writing is easier when you are figments of my imagination, a loyal gathering of glamorous sex goddesses who sit by their laptops, wearing the latest in French lingerie, caressing their bodies as they read my latest post. That’s who I see as my demographic. Not real people.
Is it wrong that, a few months ago, I started to gather people’s portraits on Flickr, like a thirteen year old boy collecting baseball cards?
The goal was a lofty one — to have at least one photo from everyone on my Google Reader list, so I could match the faces to the blogs. This is very different from those big-shot bloggers who ASK you for your photos, just so they can prove their popularity to the world. This was all for me — I never asked for permission. It was all my own private set of playing cards, stolen from Flickr in the deep darkness of the night, while you were sleeping, carefully picking and choosing only those portraits that gave me amusement or titillation.
I started my new hobby after I didn’t go to BlogHer. I saw all the fun photos of everyone eating cheeseburgers and having pajama parties. I felt lonely and left out. I saw some faces for the first time, and decided to “favorite” them. It was then that the plan was hatched. I would CONTROL ALL OF YOU! Not just those at BlogHer, but every person I had ever met online, no matter what country! But after a few days of people collecting, I immediately stopped, worried that someone would catch on, and I would seem like a mad scientist, an evil Flickr puppetmaster, and just plain stalkerish.
But I think it came from a good place.
Do I have permission to continue on with my quest of favoriting a photo of you, or is this just wrong?  Should I ask for permission first?
Now seriously — how many other blogs that you read write about stuff like this?!
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