Nipplegate’ again, this time on Net

NEWYORK: Among the tens of thousands of photographs uploaded to one of the internet’s biggest picture-sharing websites last month, two turned out to be remarkably popular. One showed a beautiful Icelandic blonde knitting herself a green scarf that was precariously wrapped around her nude torso; the other a female breast through a near-transparent blouse.

Both were self-portraits of gifted amateur women photographers whose work has attracted hundreds of thousands of internet viewers. And each photograph ignited a furious debate about what one woman photographer has described as “the new trend for the enlightened, liberated woman of today ... to be proudly naked on the internet.”

“Mona Lisa is finally jumping out of the frame, slapping Leonardo and painting herself ,” declared Lola the Car Chick, a photographer who was among more than 11,000 viewers of the scarf shot by Rebekka Guoleifsdottir, a 28-year-old single mother from Reykjavik.

Yet accusations of narcissism, exhibitionism and feminist betrayal have dogged them. So combative were the comments on the breast picture published by a Dutch photographer known online as Solea that she dubbed the controversy “nipplegate” . Solea said last week: “I’ve had disturbing e-mails from a deranged person who was threatening me. But I like to use myself as a model and I will never stop.”

On the photo-sharing website Flickr.com, which claims 4 milion users, there were more than 620,000 photographs last week filed under the label “me” (there were 12,000 more labelled “moi”).

So many amateur photographers are posting self-portraits online that one prominent New York gallery has opened a digital exhibition displaying collections of Flickr photos. “We are interested in the world’s view of what a self-portrait is,” said Peter MacGill of the Pace/MacGill gallery. “At best these pictures represent new approaches, new dynamics, perhaps even a new aesthetic.” Yet they are also triggering venomous exchanges between the photographers and critics.

Jessica, of California, warned that “unfortunately there are more and more people trying to get attention via their nipples.” The trend has already claimed one notable victim—Tamara Hoover, a Texas teacher, who lost her job when school officials found she appeared topless in snaps posted by her husband to Flickr.