Fun with the A9 Yellow Pages
I’ve become fascinated with the incidental moments captured in the A9 Yellow Pages. A9 is Amazon’s search engine, and they sent out teams to travel the streets of ten major US cities photographing as many store fronts as they could. Then they linked the photos to business listings in the their online yellow pages. The results are amazing. Sometimes extraordinary pictures of everyday people and places.
Then I noticed Alan Taylor had started to pick his favorites and post them to Flickr with the tag a9local. He credits his inspiration to something Paul Bausch had written on the subject of capturing accidental moments of everyday life. Well, I couldn’t resist joining in the fun. I was further inspired by Jonah’s slide show of a drive down Melrose Drive. When you set the slide show timing to one second, the effect is of a stop-motion movie. I created my own of a drive down Broadway in Seattle. Jonah has since put together three more slide shows which are really amazing. This could be the beginning of a new minor art happening.
Lastly, Mikel Maron has created a script that will capture all the photos on a particular run up a street in the A9 Yellow Pages, then display them on a single page or produce a mini slide show. Fantastic. I’m sure this is only the beginning of the clever things people will do with this incredible resource.
I should also mention there’s a A9 Flickr group already in place. Come join us.
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