Jeff Hamada is the brains, and brawn behind the art/photo blog powerhouse that is Booooooom. You might have heard of it. If you’re like me, or millions of other awesome folks, you visit his site on the regular. Since I was in Vancouver for the Cheaper Show, I figured it would be a good idea to reach out to the Richmond, BC native responsible for one of my favorite online destinations.

Jeff is super cool. We talked about everything from Flickr, art, music, and community in the digital age, to Japanese point and shoot cameras, Vancouver, and our favorite photography books. The food was pretty good too.
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Why Booooooom?

When I originally started Booooooom, it was based off of many design sites I would read. I just wanted to make mine I guess not minimal. I think that a lot of design sites are moving towards a really minimal, nicely laid out page, and they are amazing sites, I still read them every day, but I want to try, and see if I can get people to comment on stuff a lot. Many design sites they don’t and maybe that’s not the focus. I’m way more interested in community more than anything, and I think the fact that Booooooom happens to be about art and photography, is secondary to it being about connecting with people. It could just as easily be about all movies or music videos, because I like all those things. It’s an easy way for me to connect with people. That informs everything.

I would like to figure out ways to engage people, and get them doing stuff. Next year I will focus a lot on growing the following of the site in Vancouver, with the goal of having this huge network of people in my hometown, all connected, and doing stuff.

A lot of people I find, want to critique art, or feel like they need to be able to critique art to appreciate it, and I’m simply excited about celebrating work. I wanted the site more to be where I posted about someone’s work, and a ton of people wrote back telling them they were awesome. That’s essentially the most basic premise behind it. For example, if I posted your work, I want you to come, and see a ton of comments that are positive about it. I feel like that’s motivating me the most. I want the site to be an overall cheerleader for arts and photography, a site that’s always enthusiastically pushing the work out to more people. I feel like it’s trying to make work that is less mainstream more mainstream, just in terms of how many people get to see it. I think that it’s crazy the amount of people who view the site now [about 2.5 million hits a month], and it’s fun for me to push work that normally is really niche out to a lot of people. Most people wouldn’t even know about the blogs that were posting this stuff, and it’s definitely not like Booooooom is the only one. There are a ton of them. They’re just a lot smaller, and I think that’s usually because the people running it are just doing it for fun, or they don’t really care how big it gets, but I feel that now that Boooooom is pretty big, this is a good opportunity then to help push artists who are lesser known, emerging, or maybe not even interested in pursuing a career.

It’s been cool to focus on work by people who are totally not famous next to maybe really well known people. Like in the photo project we just did [Small Victories] in Hong Kong. It was cool to just take work over there and include really amazing photographers that I actually invited to be in the show.

Who did you invite?

Seth Fluker, Jeff Luker,Jess Gough…all these people that I really like. I feel like the Flickr community almost has this new movement going on.

I got into Flickr by accident. I set up an account with the sole purpose of linking pics to my Tumblr. Next thing I know I’m up at 2 am eating a bowl of Annie’s mac & cheese, joining group pools,  favoriting images left and right, and adding contacts.

To me Flickr is one of the most powerful social networks. I don’t think people see it as a social network, but it’s amazing because it’s a social network based around one hobby in a way. It’s really specific. Right away you are immediately surrounded by people who are into the same thing that interests you. I know so many people who meet really close friends through Flickr. They start off as Internet friends but by the time you meet in person it’s like you’re good friends already.

There are also people who are pretty loyal, the way they follow someone. They’ll know every single photo the person shot just because they go through their whole photostream. It’s just an amazing tool I think for being able to favorite other people’s images, and for me finding new work. That’s a big way I find new work. Because I just go through a lot of people’s favorites. I might post your work, and then look to see what photos you like, and it might introduce me to 20 people I haven’t written about. It’s a never-ending tree where I can keep branching off of others’ favorites.

What’s cool about that it’s rewarding people with a good eye, not necessarily people who can retouch something in Photoshop, but just someone who has an eye for it.  They see the world in a different way, and for that photography to get more popular is great.

How often do you go through the Boooooom group flickr pool?

I just periodically run through and manually update the featured artist, featured photographer, and Flickr select thing. I probably have to figure out a better way of doing it, or get someone to help me, because it’s a lot to do a comment on the site, and then update those things as well.

Wait, nobody is helping you?

Oh, yea it’s just me.

I saw that Jennilee Marigomen from 01 Magazine guest curated the site while you were in Hong Kong.

Yea, Jennilee’s awesome. 01 Magazine is awesome. She takes her own photography, and has a great design sense too. All of her stuff is pretty tight.

I asked if she would post maybe a few times along the way. I told her pretty much that she was the only person I contacted, and the only person I would trust to post on the site while I was away. I really like everything she posts, and the stuff she finds really influences a lot of the things I post about too.

What kind of work do you find yourself posting the most?

I feel like there’s a common thread between all the things I put on Booooooom, but I don’t think too hard about it. It just ends up being like that. I really like, loose drawing and painting, weird expressive lines, not necessarily abstract, but noodly doodly drawings. As for photography, I don’t like images where the lens is distorting the perspective. I prefer pictures looking how you would see with your eye. And quiet I guess.

There is a commonality between all the Flickr stuff that I started to really appreciate. People that can notice a moment on the street and just be able to capture it right at that minute. There’s a real energy to things that a second later they wouldn’t have that moment.

I watermarked my images the first year of art school. Now it completely turns me off. Especially since it’s easier than ever to push your work, and link to it with zero effort.

I never understood watermarking. I also would never feature any work that has a watermark. It’s like people who would cover their couch with plastic material. Sure I guess it’s like keeping it clean, but then the whole time you are enjoying the couch through this plastic thing, but you’re not enjoying the couch. I would much rather enjoy the couch until the point it breaks to pieces, then I throw it away, and get another one. What are you really trying to do? You’re so worried that someone’s going to make money off your work, but you are missing all of the positives of just letting it go. Just let anybody take it. The more that you can just push your work out there and really free it, the better chance you have of more people seeing it.

When I designed my site I looked at it like a house that I wanted people to rob essentially. I wanted to make it as easy as possible for thieves to come in, and steal everything out of my house or off of my site. So that means, leaving all of the doors open, including the back door, the window, the garage, and you do that by being on Twitter, on Facebook, having people be able to subscribe to an RSS feed, people actually directly coming to the site, and have as many possible ways for people to engage the content. When I realized that I had to make it easy to take the content, that’s when it really started to get popular. That’s the whole beauty of the Internet, the stealing, and the reblogging. Now, there are ways to track work even when it’s not directly linked to you.

When did you design that How a Bird Becomes a Ghost T? That one always makes me laugh.

Maybe a year ago. It was for a friend’s t-shirt company, and it was a doodle I had drawn, and fixed it up in illustrator. All my stuff is kind of dumb humor. I just like silly things.

I didn’t even grab one of those for myself.

How did that happen?

I’m pretty bad at documenting my own work. I have to be way more on it. For  the Cheaper Show I forgot to scan in the piece, but I literally finished painting it, stuck it in a frame, and walked it down to the show a few days later. I got a cell phone pic of it on the wall, but the lack of documentation will just encourage me to make more work. I’m exited now to produce some more work. It’s weird where a lot of people I went to art school with, or anyone I’ve met along the way, has been making work for a long time, and I haven’t really been. Only because I felt a little discouraged coming out of art school, and I just didn’t have a style, or a thing that I liked to do. So, I feel that I did the opposite, where I spent the next few years building up an audience. The blog essentially is an audience now for my work. It’s as if you made a film, and you have to find a theater that would show it. I did the opposite. I invited everyone to this theater and I don’t have a film, and now I have to make the film, so it’s kind of a unique spot I’m in now, where I have all of these people waiting to see something. I just have to make the stuff. I’m excited for the opportunity to make a ton of stuff, or just collaborate with people, launch projects, and immediately have this pretty big audience.

I feel that it’s good to have that kind of pressure.

My worst fear is being lazy. I just want to be successful.

What does success mean to you?

Being able to live doing exactly what I want all the time, putting 100 percent of my energy into the thing that I love to do, and be able to survive doing it. If I can do that I would be stoked for life.

Jeff: Website, Flickr, Twitter, Booooooom