The Story Behind the IKEA Photo of Amsterdam
petapixel.com
petapixel.com
Actually, the video made me cry a little bit.
After watching the video, I found https://www.deepakg.com/the-canal-in-ikeas-amsterdam-photo which gives the location and the name of the houseboat. (If you want to see it in Google Street View, a better search is probably Brouwersgracht 56.)
None the less, this was a trend in the 90s I think with greeting cards companies whose tropes were highlighted kids, roses/flowers, balloons, etc., against a gray backdrop.
“Finally, I got in touch with the lead designer at IKEA who had picked the photo more than 10 years ago. I ask him why he picked the photo, and he told me that the first thing they design at IKEA is the price.
This photo was just very, very cheap, and that’s why they picked it.”
As someone a bit older, I almost can't stand how awesome everything is today.
Just one technique that popped out was the timing, animation of the captioning. Done before, sure, but this author's technique somehow adds to the story telling.
What a time to be alive.
- "American Girl in Italy" which appeared to be a lady being leered at by a whole load of guys. https://edition.cnn.com/2017/03/30/europe/tbt-ruth-orkin-ame...
- "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper" which is a bunch of guys sitting suspended in the air. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QCYDzsQ_yM
Not sure why those particular two, but I'm almost surprised if I don't see one of them in one of those types of shops.
When you are not good looking, leering behaviour is called harassment. So, this painting promotes harassment it seems.
Sure, even some slaves weren't offended at the time when slavery was acceptable. Today, this behaviour is considered harrasment.
Feel free to try it on the street and put a video for us.
I'm glad she says it was fine, and I notice my perception is coloured by my own experiences. Still, for me, it's a powerful image, and one I wouldn't put up for background decoration.
Hopefully, with a strong support system, we can both overcome our irrational discomfort from pictures of things that truly present no harm.
Restaurants are really incapable of trying to accommodate all the edge cases for discomfort. Interestingly, I bet seeing these in some way helps.
The fact that there's so many groups of seemingly unrelated guys in the picture is good though, they will keep each other in check and if there's trouble some of them will step up to help. If you can be sure there won't be a small subset of them following you one minute later, it could be worse. They seem to be on some sort of break, so you're probably safe from that. The guy with the scooter looks the most problematic, so keep an eye on that one without looking at him.
This is a normal though process for many women. In almost all cases it's perfectly safe, but you need to catch the one where it isn't. Are you telling me this is irrational?
And it's a GREAT photo, it tells a story, it tells of another time and another place, of a behavior that today it would be considered unacceptable, but probably at the time was considered normal.
It's sad that today we feel compelled to judge everything based on how "offensive" something is according to modern standards, without for a moment stopping thinking about context.
// The caption on the photo of Craig walking down the street reflects cultural mores of the era. "Public admiration ... shouldn't fluster you. Ogling the ladies is a popular, harmless and flattering pastime you'll run into in many foreign countries. The gentlemen are usually louder and more demonstrative than American men, but they mean no harm."
It's a far cry from what we tell women these days, but for its time the mere notion of encouraging women to travel alone was progressive. That's what made the photos so special, Craig says. They offered a rare glimpse of two women -- behind and in front of the camera -- challenging the era's gender roles and loving every minute of it.
"I look at it and I'm taken right back and it was wonderful," she says. "I was an art student. I was carefree. I was 23 and the world was my oyster."
//
“Finally, I got in touch with the lead designer at IKEA who had picked the photo more than 10 years ago. I ask him why he picked the photo, and he told me that the first thing they design at IKEA is the price.
This photo was just very, very cheap, and that’s why they picked it.”
We {makers | artists | artisans} want to create something that's great, or beautiful, or complete. But commercially, what's viable is the (forgive the cliche) Pareto solution. This photo is 80% of a great photo, at 20% of the price. I tend to forget that the 80% solution is an option to consider when I'm working on a project.
I coincidentally live in Amsterdam and also have been learning photography, not because of any intrinsic interest but because my wife said "buy an SLR because we'll be having kids in a few years, and I want to have nice photos of them." We now have a baby (and many wonderful photos), but I find myself really frustrated that I've put significant effort into learning the technical part of the skillset and she has not. But when I really consider the imbalance, it's true that she can get the 80% result with point and shoot auto or my presets, and there's no reason for me to get judgmental that she doesn't make more of an effort.
When partnering with a distributor like IKEA, and considering they've sold ~500K of these prints, a "cheap" royalty can be very lucrative.
> This photo was just very, very cheap, and that’s why they picked it.
It makes total sense, but seeing it stated directly like that reduces my desire for their art and decor. Not knowing how they do things lets you fool yourself into thinking there's something more there than the cheapest acceptable photo from an archive.
Edit: decor -> art and decor
I found out about IKEA’s Democratic Design Day through My Mini Factory.
It’s probably not a unique philosophy. But I like the idea that good quality design should be available to everybody.
It’s probably a tough gig trying to design an item starting with the cost first. But I think they have largely succeeded.
You can get wonderfully built artisan furniture, but it won't be as robust against abuse as IKEA stuff generally is.
The interesting thing about IKEA is that while the materials are cheap, they are also build to last. You can disassemble IKEA stuff and reassemble it without breaking it too much and they know that because their customer support is amazing. I carried boatloads of things back and replaced them because they were no fit.
If IKEA would build just flimsy thing they could not afford that level of customer support because everybody would just replace the broken parts. They don't break nearly as often as you would believe.
this has been used as a promotional tagline in their catalogues for at least a decade, it's not just some quip an interviewee came up with. If it's the sort of thing that makes you not want to shop at ikea, you probably already weren't shopping at ikea.
Is one of the reasons I pronounce it 'ickier'. Well, that and their repeated inability to cut bed slats all to the same length. Sitting down heavily on an ickier bed is strictly for gamblers.
I've had a lot of issues with IKEA bed slats. It's a shame because the beds themselves are great.
Well, I did start calling it ickier at around the age of twelve.
I have also had a lifetime obsession with "I'm Sorry, I Haven't A Clue" on BBC Radio 4, so a fondness for excruciatingly bad wordplay is just part of my general makeup by this point.
+400k humans from everyone now have this one thing in common.
I feel the same about sports, church, music, politics. I vividly remember the watch party for the last episode of Seinfeld. Totally not my thing, I didn't even own a TV, my girlfriend dragged me along. I watched the people watching the TV. They related to each other thru this one shared cultural experience. For a brief time, most everyone's minds were synced.
Sometimes I envy people who connect in those ways.
The corollary to that is that by focusing on price Ikea makes the best products for the price.
Sounds like a poor justification. There are tons of pictures in the public domain so it's not like there is no abundance of choice there.