In the competitive world of internet publicity, Reykjavik resident Rebekka Gudleifsdottir, a 28 year old student in Iceland, has become one of the most popular names in photography.
With hundreds of thousands of amateurs posting work on the web, sites like YouTube are flooded with personal videos. Writers by the thousands post blogs every day and hundreds of thousands of people view work in different mediums on their favorite websites every day. So how do you get noticed?
Todd Cochrane founded a company which builds podcasting sites. According to him, “Shows that are consistent have a tendency to grow more than those that aren’t.” Regularly updated websites get regular attention.
Gudleifsdottir is a photographer who puts her work on a popular photo sharing website known as Flickr. She puts two or three new pictures on her site every week. She has over 750 pictures on line all together and website statistics indicate that her work has been viewed over 3 million times. That’s probably more publicity than all the art galleries she could ever show in combined.
Another way to get noticed on the web is to get out there yourself and drum up some publicity. For Gudleifsdottir, it’s as easy as viewing other’s photos on Flickr and leaving comments. The comments are linked back to her own page, drawing interested people to her site. In addition she has a MySpace page and her own website.
But it is on Flickr that she has received the most attention, winning an award for her self portraits in 2005. Gudleifsdottir says the self portraits, which were a bit revealing, were one way to draw in an audience.
One of her fans wrote: “”Every time I visit Rebekka’s photos, my jaw always drops and I find myself saying “How the heck did she do that?” There are a lot of great photographers on here, but only a few brightly burning stars.”
In addition to the positive feedback from fans, Gudleifsdottir’s popularity got her noticed by Toyota Motor Corp who recently hired her to shoot photos for their marketing campaign in Iceland.
Gudleifsdottir is self taught and has been working as a photographer since 2005. “To hear that my work brings joy to others makes me feel quite blessed,” she writes on her website. “What more can an artist hope for?”