Yesterday I woke up to find out one of my pics from my recent BLM protest images made it to Flickr’s Explore front page..
To be honest, it all started with Flickr for reasons I’ll come back to in a sec. In the earlier days of my photography career I had some of my images appear on the photo-hosting site’s most sought-after page before but I had to look up when that was. It turned out the last time was fifteen years ago.
A lot has changed in the industry but the good olde photo-sharing site always has a special place in my heart. Above all it is were I met my lovely spouse. It’s also where WHYY’s editor Alan Tu found my (monochrome) photo set from an Obama rally (with Joe Biden) a few days after I photographed them in 2010, behind Germantown High School.
He saw my work and decided to give me a call to talk about WHYY’s then still unannounced news effort, called Newsworks.org. Today their branding and hyper-local focus have changed a bit and I am glad to still be send out on occasional assignments.
To make the circle round, June 11, 2020 will mark a very unique day in my personal path in photography. Not only one of my images from the recent historic events made it to the Flickr front page, I also am assigned to cover an (due to COVID-19 Pandemic rare) appearance of Democratic U.S. presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden as part of a small photo pool.
As I write this I am archiving the photos I made for REUTERS at a round table on the U.S. economy reopening with the same Joe that appeared in front of my lens almost a decade ago.
Thanks to everyone who made this all possible (and yes, that includes you too: Flickr!
Bastiaan Slabbers, Independent Photojournalist 