Photographer Googlegangers

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Mike © Amy Stein (not me)

If you know Brian Ulrich then you know he performs smooth jazz the way you like it. Perhaps you know about Brian's ministry that serves up the word with sweet and easy saxophone music.

Oh, wait. Did you think I was talking about Brian Ulrich, the godless photographer from Chicago who beatifies his dark photo lord with an evil ritual of BMX, anti-consumerism, and gut wrenching guitar salvos? It's an easy mistake if you are like every other person in the world and use Google as your entry point for any and all information.

Brian Ulrich meet Brian Ulrich. You are brethren in name and in search results. You are Googlegangers.

I have my own Googlegangers. For many years when you searched my name there was a good chance that the first results would be for Santa Fe based artist and healer, Amy Stein. Or, maybe you would find Amy Stein, the Chairman of Manatee County Board of Commissioners. (Commissioner Amy Stein is currently embroiled in a messy landfill debate.) Still another Amy Stein, the teenage poet, could haunt your Google searches with her lovelorn prose of teenage despondency.

Luckily, my husband is a bit of a online marketing genius and he's managed to push me, the real Amy Stein, to the top of the Google search results. On occasion, I still cross online paths with my Googlegangers in RSS feeds, but my attention of late has been focused on the Internet twins of some of my fellow photographers.

So, let me reintroduce you to Shen Wei, the dancer. Or, how about Nathan Baker, Associate Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Washington University in St. Louis. How about the ace work of Alison Brady?

I'm curious about your Googlegangers. Have you every reached out through the tubes and introduced yourself?

A Kind of Immortality

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Map of the Internet

By now many of you have heard of the apparent double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. I really wasn't aware of their lives before they decided to end them, but because Theresa lived such a public life through her blog I have come to appreciate her work and thoughts since her passing. I mention all of this because unbeknownst to me Theresa once mentioned my work on her blog and I have been getting a lot of traffic over the past week from her site. It would appear that a lot of people are like me and are only coming to her writing after reading of her death.

Much of the talk of the Web relates to the ephemeral nature of the medium. Buzz is created and crowds form only to move on to the next cultural phenomenon after our interest wanes. This pattern satisfies my ADD-addled brain with a constant supply of stimulation, but I am growing more and more fascinated with the idea of the Web as an ongoing permanent index of every thought and every image ever committed to the network. It's crazy to think that we are contributing to an exhaustive informational phylogency that is mapping and holding the products of our impermanence in a perpetual place. I know this is the centerpiece of Google's business model, but in a very real sense we are also creating a kind of immortality. The recent visitors form Theresa's blog brought this home to me in a very real way.

I should mention that I debated whether or not to post this missive. Again, I didn't know these people and I certainly have no interest in using their death to draw attention to myself. The recent traffic from Theresa's site struck a reflective chord and I felt the need to share. Good idea or bad idea it is now committed to the Internet forever.