What is an archive?

At its simplest, an archive is a repository of historical records like photographs, documents, sound recordings, books and artworks. Speciality archives may focus on a particular medium, such as the Moving Image Archive or a place, like the London Metropolitan Archives. Archives house physical or digital records or a combination of both. Many archives are found within larger institutions such as universities, libraries, museums, government offices, and established public or private organizations. Usually, these archives have their materials grouped into collections managed by professionals called archivists. 

There are all kinds of informal archives as well. Lots of smaller community and cultural organizations keep records of their activities but may not have a dedicated archivist to keep them organized. We, individuals, also record our lives through photography, sometimes printing them or keeping them in digital photo albums, or online on various social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, or Flickr.

What is Photovoice?

Originally conceived and put into practice by health researchers Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris in the early 1990s, Photovoice involves working alongside participants to take photographs and subsequently discuss them in order to be able to collectively illuminate and reflect upon contemporary issues within a community. At the end of the project, a selection of the photos taken and discussed is exhibited for the community to share the insights that were collectively produced. Often, researchers engaging in Photovoice seek to recalibrate the power imbalance between researcher and subject by lending the tools for research (i.e. the camera) to the active participants, thus elevating them to the position of collaborator, co-researcher, or co-producer.

Archivevoice is an extension of Photovoice, alongside others like Videovoice and Comicvoice. By using the principles of participatory action research developed in Photovoice, other researchers have modified their methods engaging in different artistic mediums for participants’ self-expression. Videovoice has the goal of getting “people, who are usually the subjects or consumers of mainstream media [to] get behind video cameras to research issues of concern, communicate their knowledge, and advocate for change.” Comicvoice, coined by John Baird, engages research groups in creating their own narratives from outsourced comics.

Why Archives?

There is so much rich, historical information available within archives. One of the limits of the Photovoice method is what is available to be photographed. Through Archivevoice, the research participants are able to navigate through much broader windows of time and space to reflect and discuss how historical events shape the contemporary moment. This kind of embodied practice of looking back and critically engaging with one’s community and culture through such a deep, reflective practice has been referred to by scholars as “ancestor work”. 

Archivevoice

Archivevoice is a Participatory Action Research (PAR) method that adapts the core principles of Photovoice using photographs or other archival documentation to undergo community-centered research.

“Through exhibitions and outreach events community members can be brought to the archive and made aware of what records are present in the archives. They can see themselves, their families, and their histories represented in the materials and engage with those who are responsible for preserving and describing that history. Through workshops and naming events, the archives can be brought to community members for the purpose of facilitating discussion, memory making, and healing together.”

– Kristen Young

What is the purpose of Archivevoice?

• To use photographs and other archival documentation to reflect on collective experiences affecting communities
• To gain insight about a particular community’s histories, activities, and concerns
• To engage communities with their own archival records
• To empower communities to lend their voice to heritage projects and document their own histories
• To have community participants be co-producers of research
• To activate the archive through creative presentation of the selected records (e.g. exhibition, zine, phonebook, etc.)

How could I run an Archivevoice session?

Archivevoice borrows the same five-phase approach outlined in Vanese Apaza and Phoebe DeSantis’s 2016 Facilitator’s Toolkit for a Photovoice Project, with the authors’ permission. The five phases adapted to Archivevoice are as follows:

Phase 1: Introduction to Archivevoice

Introducing the method, the project and its research questions. Introduce participants to the archive or collection that will be explored, and the possible project outputs.


Phase 2: Selection of archival photos or other documentation



In Archivevoice, this phase replaces the photo-taking step in Photovoice. This is when the participants will receive archive research training tailored to the particular archive they are working with. They search the archive and select the photographs or other materials they wish to discuss. The project manager or lead researcher may want to preselect the items available for study (e.g. limiting the search within specific collections or setting specific inclusion criteria such as using materials with ‘no known copyright restrictions’).


Phase 3: Discussion around selected media

Just as in Apaza & DeSantis’ process, the “SHOWeD” method can be used to prompt the research participants to discuss the selected media.

SHOWeD is an acronym used in community-based health care research inspired by the pedagogical teachings of Paulo Freire. 

S – What things did you see?

H – What was happening?

O – Does this happen in our community?
W – Why does this happen?

D – What can we do about it?



While SHOWeD has a long history of being used in conjunction with Photovoice, other reflection and discussion methods such as focus groups, semi-structured interviews, and narrative writing are also possible or can be used in conjunction with SHOWeD depending on what is deemed appropriate or relevant by the lead researcher.

Phase 4: Media processing for archive activation

Here the selected archival media must be prepared for display. This could involve ensuring that the researcher has the appropriate rights or permissions to reproduce the identified media, that copyright is granted (or no known copyright restrictions are applied), and digitizing, formatting, and printing.

Phase 5: Community exhibition or other public output

Photovoice projects often culminate in a public exhibition for the community who were the subjects of the photos taken during the project. Similarly, once proper permissions are secured for the selected archival media, an exhibition of these items can be produced either physically – in the archive itself or gallery or community centre or online. Other options for public presentations of these selected media could be a book or zine, online exhibition, documentary, podcast, and more. 

Archivevoice serves as an adaptation of Photovoice to facilitate engagement with archival intervention and activation. According to Freire, “education must begin with the solution of the teacher-student contradiction, by reconciling the poles of the contradiction so that both are simultaneously teachers and students.” In this sense, a critical pedagogy requires both parties, “teachers” and “students” to understand that they each have something to learn from the other and that knowledge can be freely transferred from one to another. Participants who become de facto co-researchers in these projects in which they are given relative autonomy to express themselves through the selected media (e.g. photo, video, comic, archive, etc.) are empowered to have their feedback and knowledge heard and understood and they make planning and curatorial decisions. By elevating their status to co-researchers and collaborators, 

Archivevoice and the other -voice projects dissolve knowledge hierarchies asserting that lived experience and community knowledge merit their place in research and public pedagogy projects.  

For my final blog post—coming soon—I will report on my own investigation of the Archivevoice method, through a workshop I ran recently in Montreal with researchers from the Access in the Making Lab located at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. Members from the lab are currently engaged in a project researching the disabling conditions that climate change and systems of extraction are having on various populations and ecosystems around the world. Together, we went through the steps of the Archivevoice method using Flickr as its source archive, looking for and discussing images that related to the researchers’ individual projects. The vast quantity of photos available in the Flickr archive prompted many interesting topics of discussion that will be explored in part three of this series.

Bibliography

Apaza, Vanesa, Phoebe Desantis, Aurea DeLeon, Jaclyn Keelin, Alexandra Ovits, Sherrine Schuldt, and Michael Spillane. “Facilitator’s Toolkit for a Photovoice Project.” United for Prevention in Passaic County and the William Paterson University Department of Public Health, 2016. https://www.up-in-pc.org/clientuploads/Whatwedo/Flyers/UPinPC_Photovoice_Facilitator_Toolkit_Final.pdf.

BAIRD, John Loige. “Comicvoice: Community Education through Sequential Art.” In POP CULTURE ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING, Vol. 13, 2010.

Catalani, Caricia E. C. V., Anthony Veneziale, Larry Campbell, Shawna Herbst, Brittany Butler, Benjamin Springgate, and Meredith Minkler. “Videovoice: Community Assessment in Post-Katrina New Orleans.” Health Promotion Practice 13, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 18–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839910369070.

Freire, Paulo, Donaldo P. Macedo, Ira Shor, and Myra Bergman Ramos. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 50th anniversary edition. 1 online resource (viii, 220 pages) vols. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. https://nls.ldls.org.uk/welcome.html?ark:/81055/vdc_100055048362.0x000001.

Shaffer, Roy. “Beyond the Dispensary.” English Press: Nairobi, Kenya, 1986. https://www.amoshealth.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/62/2019/10/Beyond-the-Dispensary.pdf.

Young, Kristen. “Black Community Archives in Practice.” In Black Community Archives in Practice, 211–21. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780228019152-011.

 

On September 26, 2024, we hosted our first-ever public conversation featuring director George Oates and advisors Anasuya Sengupta and Eliza Gregory. The event explored critical questions about preserving digital visual history in our rapidly evolving technological landscape.

The discussion centered on our purpose: to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. We discussed the long list of technological uncertainties, with George quoting another Flickr Foundation advisor, Temi Odumosu, who said, “We don’t even know what a JPEG will be in ten years.”

Anasuya described social justice issues, emphasizing that digital preservation must address questions of power and representation. She stressed how important it is for marginalized communities to control  their narratives , and how we must keep this in the front of our minds as we make tools..

The conversation touched on several key points:

• We must balance vast scale with meaningful personal engagement
• Using Flickr Commons to empowering communities to define their histories 
• How we can support smaller cultural institutions in digital preservation efforts
• What community engagement brings to enriching digital archives
• Myriad curatorial challenges as we consider deciding what to preserve

→ Read the full transcript of the event

 

Preserving Our Visual Heritage: The Flickr Foundation was established in 2022 with the purpose to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. As part of our work, we look after the Flickr Commons, a unique collection of historical photographs from cultural institutions all around the world.

To stay in touch, follow us on LinkedIn or sign up for our occasional newsletter (at the bottom of our home page).

Hello Flickr Foundation family!

My name is Joshua Christman and I am a designer thrilled to be working with the Flickr Foundation.

I first stumbled across Flickr in the early 00s, being part of the generation who began exploring their identities through online photo sharing. Growing up in rural USA, Flickr offered a window into a larger world full of diversity and culture – and with that, a larger sense of belonging and understanding the bigger picture of humanity.

I am bringing a wide range of experiences and skills to the Foundation team. My undergraduate studies at Parsons School for Design kicked off a career where I have explored multiple avenues of creativity collaborating with brands, non-profits, artists and everyday people on everything from interior design to music videos to logos and packaging. All these experiences have one thing in common: to visually communicate a message and foster connection.

So, who am I on the Flickr Foundation family tree?

Working with George, I am helping to launch the “Best Little Museum Shop” – the Flickr Foundation’s unique take on small batches of limited edition merch. The merch will make use of photos from Flickr Commons as well as graphic data sets from projects such as Data Lifeboat – using creative interpretation and art to raise awareness of all the wonderful things the folks at Flickr.org are working so hard for, and to offer our donors something to thank them for their support.

Hello, world! I’m Fattori, Lead Researcher on the Data Lifeboat Project at the Flickr Foundation.

I first used Flickr in 2005; at that time, I was an angsty teen who needed a place to store grainy photos of Macclesfield, my post-industrial hometown, that I shot on an old Minolta camera. Since then, both my career and my academic research have focused on themes that are central to the aims of Flickr.org: images, databases, community, and the recording of human experiences.

In 2017 I began working as a researcher for strategic design studios based in New York, Helsinki, London and Mumbai. My research tried to address complex questions about humans’ experience of modern visual cultures by blending semiotics, ethnography and participatory methods. My commercial projects allowed me to explore women’s domestic needs in rural Vietnam, the future of work in America’s Rust Belt, and much in between.

As a postgraduate researcher at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute, my work explores how blockchain experiments have shaped art and heritage sectors in the U.K. and Italy. At an Oxford Generative AI Summit I met the Flickr Foundation’s Co-Founder, George, and we hosted a workshop on Flickr’s 100-Year Plan with University and Bodleian academics, archivists, and students. I subsequently became more involved with Flickr.org when I contributed research to their generative AI time-capsule, A Generated Family of Man.

Now, as a Lead Researcher at Flickr.org, I’m developing a plan to help better understand future users of Data Lifeboat and the proposed Safe Harbour Network. We want to know how these tools might be implemented in real-world contexts, what problems they might solve, and how we can maintain the soft, collective infrastructure that keeps the Data Lifeboat afloat. 

Beyond my professional life, I always have a jumper on my knitting needles (I can get quite nerdy about wool), I rush to a potter’s wheel whenever I can, and I’m writing a work of historical fiction about a mystic in the Balearic Islands. Like my 2005 self, I still snap the odd photo, these days on a Nikon L35AF.

Isn’t it interesting what a photograph has become today, in 2024?

I had the wonderful opportunity to visit London and Flickr Foundation HQ during the month of May 2024. The first month of my fellowship was a busy one, getting settled in, meeting the team, and making contacts around the UK to share and develop my idea for a new qualitative research method that was inspired by my perusing of just a minuscule fraction of the billions of photos uploaded and visible on Flickr.com.

Unlike the brilliant and techno-inspired minds of my Flickr Foundation cohort: George, Alex, Ewa, and Eryk, my head is often drifting in the clouds (the ones in the actual sky) or deep in books, articles, and archives. Since rediscovering Flickr and contemplating its many potential uses, I have activated my past work as a researcher, artist, and cultural worker, to reflect upon the ways Flickr could be used to engage communities in various visual and digital ethnographies.

Stemming from anthropology and the social sciences more broadly, ethnography is a branch of qualitative research involving the study of cultures, communities, or organizations. A visual ethnography thereby employs visual methods, such as photography, film, drawing, or painting.. Similarly, digital ethnography refers to the ethnographic study of cultures and communities as they interact with digital and internet technologies.

In this first post, I will trace a nonlinear timeline of different community-based and academic research projects I have conducted in recent years. Important threads from each of these projects came together to form the basis of the new ethnographic method I have developed over the course of this fellowship, which I call Archivevoice. 

Visual representations of community

The research I conducted for my masters thesis was an example of a digital, visual ethnography. For a year, I observed Instagram accounts sharing curated South Asian visual media, analyzing the types of content they shared, the different media used, the platform affordances that were engaged with, the comments and discussions the posts incited, and how the posts reflected contemporary news, culture, and politics. I also interviewed five people whose content I had studied. Through this research I observed a strong presence of uniquely diasporic concerns and aesthetics. Many posts critiqued the idea of different nationhoods and national affiliations with the countries founded after the partition of India in 1947 – a violent division of the country resulting in mass displacement and human casualty whose effects are still felt today. Because of this violent displacement and with multiple generations of people descended from the Indian subcontinent living outside of their ancestral territory, among many within the community, I observed a rejection of nationalist identities specific to say India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh. Instead, people were using the term “South Asian” as a general catchall for communities living in the region as well as in the diaspora. Drawing from queer cultural theorist José Esteban Muñoz, I labelled this digital, cultural phenomenon I observed “digital disidentification.”[1] 

My explorations of community-based visual media predate this research. In 2022, I worked with the Montreal grassroots artist collective and studio, Cyber Love Hotel, to develop a digital archive and exhibition space for 3D-scanned artworks and cultural objects called Things+Time. In 2023, we hosted a several-week-long residency program with 10 local, racialized, and queer artists. The residents were trained on archival description and tagging principles, and then selected what to archive. The objects curated and scanned in the context of this residency were in response to the overarching theme loss during the Covid-19 pandemic, in which rampant closures of queer spaces, restaurants, nightlife, music venues, and other community gathering spaces were proliferating across the city.

During complete pandemic lockdown, while working as the manager for cultural mediation at the contemporary gallery Centre CLARK, I conducted a similar project which involved having participants take photographs which responded to a specific prompt. In partnership with the community organization Head & Hands, I mailed disposable cameras to participants from a Black youth group whose activities were based at Head & Hands. Together with artist and CLARK member, Eve Tangy, we created educational videos on the principles of photography and disposable camera use and tasked the participants to go around their neighbourhoods taking photos of moments that, in their eyes, sparked Black Joy—the theme of the project. Following a feedback session with Eve and myself, the two preferred photos from each participants’ photo reels were printed and mounted as part of a community exhibition entitled Nous sommes ici (“We’re Here”) at the entry of Centre CLARK’s gallery. 


These public community projects were not formal or academic, but, I came to understand each of these projects as examples of what is called research-creation (or practice-based research or arts-based research). Through creative methods like curating objects for digital archiving and photography, I, as the facilitator/researcher, was interested in how the media comprising each exhibition would inform myself and the greater public about the experiences of marginalized artists and Black youth at such pivotal moments in these communities.

Photovoice: Empowering research participants

The fact that both these projects involved working with a community and giving them creative control over how they wanted their research presented reminded me of the popular qualitative research method used often within the fields of public health, sociology, and anthropology called Photovoice. The method was originally coined as Photo Novella in 1992 and then later renamed Photovoice in 1996 by researchers Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris. The flagship study that established this method for decades involved scholars providing cameras and photography training to low-income women living in rural villages of Yunnan, China.

The goals of this Photovoice research were to better understand, through the perspectives of these women, the challenges they faced within their communities and societies, and to communicate these concerns to policymakers who might be more amenable to photographic representations rather than text. Citing Paulo Freire, Wang and Burris note the potential photographs have to raise consciousness and promote collective action due to their political nature. [5]

According to Wang and Burris, “these images and tales have the potential to reach generations of children to come.” [6] The images created a medium through which these women were able to share their experiences and also relate to each other. Even with 50 villages represented in the research, shared experience and strong reactions to certain photographs came up for participants – including this picture of a young child lying in a field while her mother farmed nearby. 

According to the authors, “the image was virtually universal to their own experience. When families must race to finish seasonal cultivating, when their work load is heavy, and when no elders in the family can look after young ones, mothers are forced to bring their babies to the field. Dust and rain weaken the health of their infants… The photograph was a lightening [sic] rod for the women’s discussion of their burdens and needs.” [8]

Since its conception in the 1990s as a means for participatory needs assessment, many scholars and researchers have expanded Photovoice methodology. Given the exponential increase of camera access via smartphones, Photovoice is an increasingly feasible method for this kind of research. Recurring themes in Photovoice work include community health, mental health studies, ethnic and race-based studies, research with queer communities, as well as specific neighbourhood and urban studies. During the pandemic lockdowns, there were also Photovoice studies conducted entirely online, thus giving rise to the method of virtual Photovoice. [9]

Critical Fabulation: Filling the gaps in visual history

Following my masters thesis research, I became more interested in how communities sought to represent themselves through photography and digital media. Not only that, but also how communities would form and engage with content circulated on social media – despite these people not being the originators of this content. 

In my research, people reacted most strongly to family photographs depicting migration from South Asia to the Global North. Although reasons for emigration varied across the respondents, many people faced similar challenges with the immigration process and resettlement in a new territory. They shared their experiences through commenting online. 

People in communities which are underrepresented in traditional archives are often forced to work with limited documentation. They must do the critical and imaginative work of extrapolating what they find. While photographs can convey biographical, political, or historical meaning, exploring archived images with imagination can foster creative interpretation to fill gaps in the archival record. Scholar of African-American studies, Saidiya Hartman, introduced the term “critical fabulation” to denote this practice of reimagining the sequences of events and actors behind the narratives contained within the archive. In her words, this reconfiguration of story elements, attempts “to jeopardize the status of the event, to displace the received or authorized account, and to imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done.” [10] In reference to depictions of narratives from the Atlantic slave trade in which enslaved people are often referred to as commodities, Hartman writes “the intent of this practice is not to give voice to the slave, but rather to imagine what cannot be verified, a realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are visible only in the moment of their disappearance. It is an impossible writing which attempts to say that which resists being said (since dead girls are unable to speak). It is a history of an unrecoverable past; it is a narrative of what might have been or could have been; it is a history written with and against the archive.” [11]

I am investigating what it means to imagine the unverifiable and reckoning what only becomes visible at its disappearance. In 2020, I wrote about Facebook pages serving as archives of queer life in my home town, Montreal. [12] For this study, I once again conducted a digital ethnography, this time of the event pages surrounding a QTPOC (queer/trans person of colour)-led event series known as Gender B(l)ender. Drawing from Sam McBean, I argued that simply having access to these event pages on Facebook creates a space of possibility in which one can imagine themselves as part of these events, as part of these communities – even when physical, in-person participation is not possible. Although critical fabulation was not a method used in this study, it seemed like a precursor to this concept of collectively rethinking, reformulating, and resurrecting untold, unknown, or forgetting histories of the archives. This finally leads us to the project of my fellowship here at the Flickr Foundation.

In addition to this fellowship, I am coordinator of the Access in the Making Lab, a university research lab working broadly on issues of critical disability studies, accessibility, anti-colonialism, and environmental humanities. In my work, I am increasingly preoccupied with the question of methods: 1) how do we do archival research—especially ethical archival research—with historically marginalized communities; and, 2) how can research “subjects” be empowered to become seen as co-producers of research. 

I trace this convoluted genealogy of my own fragmented research and community projects to explain the method I am developing and have proposed to university researchers as a part of my fellowship. Following my work on Facebook and Instagram, I similarly position Flickr as a participatory archive, made by millions of people in millions of communities. [13] Eryk Salvaggio, fellow 2024 Flickr Foundation research fellow, also positions Flickr as an archive such that it “holds digital copies of historical artifacts for individual reflection and context.” [14] From this theoretical groundwork of seeing these online social image/media repositories as archives, I seek to position archival items – i.e. the photos uploaded to Flickr.com – as a medium for creative interpretation by which researchers could better understand the lived realities of different communities, just like the Photovoice researchers. I am calling this set of work and use cases “Archivevoice”.

In part two of this series, I will explore the methodology itself in more detail including a guide for researchers interested in engaging with this method.

Footnotes

[1] Prakash Krishnan, “Digital Disidentifications: A Case Study of South Asian Instagram Community Archives,” in The Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas: From Desi to Brown (Routledge, 2024), https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-and-Poetics-of-Indian-Digital-Diasporas-From-Desi-to-Brown/Jiwani-Tremblay-Bhatia/p/book/9781032593531.

[2] Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, “Empowerment through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation,” Health Education Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1994): 171–86.

[3] Kunyi Wu, Visual Voices, 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province, 1995.

[4] Wu.

[5] Caroline Wang and Mary Ann Burris, “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment,” Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (1997): 384.

[6] Wang and Burris, “Empowerment through Photo Novella,” 179.

[7] Wang and Burris, “Empowerment through Photo Novella.”

[8] Wang and Burris, 180.

[9] John L. Oliffe et al., “The Case for and Against Doing Virtual Photovoice,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 22 (March 1, 2023): 16094069231190564, https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231190564.

[10] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 11.

[11] Hartman, 12.

[12] Prakash Krishnan and Stefanie Duguay, “From ‘Interested’ to Showing Up: Investigating Digital Media’s Role in Montréal-Based LGBTQ Social Organizing,” Canadian Journal of Communication 45, no. 4 (December 8, 2020): 525–44, https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2020v44n4a3694.

[13] Isto Huvila, “Participatory Archive: Towards Decentralised Curation, Radical User Orientation, and Broader Contextualisation of Records Management,” Archival Science 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 15–36, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0.

[14] Eryk Salvaggio, “The Ghost Stays in the Picture, Part 1: Archives, Datasets, and Infrastructures,” Flickr Foundation (blog), May 29, 2024, https://www.flickr.org/the-ghost-stays-in-the-picture-part-1-archives-datasets-and-infrastructures/.

Bibliography

Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (2008): 1–14.

Huvila, Isto. “Participatory Archive: Towards Decentralised Curation, Radical User Orientation, and Broader Contextualisation of Records Management.” Archival Science 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 15–36. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0.

Krishnan, Prakash. “Digital Disidentifications: A Case Study of South Asian Instagram Community Archives.” In The Politics and Poetics of Indian Digital Diasporas: From Desi to Brown. Routledge, 2024. https://www.routledge.com/The-Politics-and-Poetics-of-Indian-Digital-Diasporas-From-Desi-to-Brown/Jiwani-Tremblay-Bhatia/p/book/9781032593531.

Krishnan, Prakash, and Stefanie Duguay. “From ‘Interested’ to Showing Up: Investigating Digital Media’s Role in Montréal-Based LGBTQ Social Organizing.” Canadian Journal of Communication 45, no. 4 (December 8, 2020): 525–44. https://doi.org/10.22230/cjc.2020v44n4a3694.

Oliffe, John L., Nina Gao, Mary T. Kelly, Calvin C. Fernandez, Hooman Salavati, Matthew Sha, Zac E. Seidler, and Simon M. Rice. “The Case for and Against Doing Virtual Photovoice.” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 22 (March 1, 2023): 16094069231190564. https://doi.org/10.1177/16094069231190564.

Salvaggio, Eryk. “The Ghost Stays in the Picture, Part 1: Archives, Datasets, and Infrastructures.” Flickr Foundation (blog), May 29, 2024. https://www.flickr.org/the-ghost-stays-in-the-picture-part-1-archives-datasets-and-infrastructures/.

Wang, Caroline, and Mary Ann Burris. “Empowerment through Photo Novella: Portraits of Participation.” Health Education Quarterly 21, no. 2 (1994): 171–86.

———. “Photovoice: Concept, Methodology, and Use for Participatory Needs Assessment.” Health Education & Behavior 24, no. 3 (1997): 369–87.

Wu, Kunyi. Visual Voices, 100 Photographs of Village China by the Women of Yunnan Province, 1995.

What’s the grant for?

It’s a 12-month grant, and mostly involves using the prototype work we’ve been doing to demonstrate and discuss the concept with our community. We can’t wait to hold the two events we have planned in the (Northern hemisphere) autumn, and we’ll likely be having them on the East Coast of the USA, and in our homebase, London. If you’d like to learn more about attending one of these small meetings, please let us know via hello [at] flickr.org.

We expect to also iterate on the software itself, but we’re not quite sure where we’ll end up just yet, especially if all our conversations result in us needing to pursue different directions.

Growing the team

As part of this grant, we’ll be advertising for two new roles, likely on contract: Researcher and Software Developer. Stay tuned for those!

What’s a Data Lifeboat again?

A Data Lifeboat is an archival piece of Flickr, not all of the 50 billion images and their metadata. For example, a Lifeboat might contain all the photos tagged with “sunflower” or all the Recipes to Share group submissions. Whatever facet of the data you can think of, you could generate a Data Lifeboat for it. We envision an archival sliver richer than a mere folder of JPGs: one where you can navigate the content to explore and understand its networked context. Even better, an archival sliver that is updated if things change at flickr.com.

Today, Flickr members can make an archive of their own photostream, and that works really well. You can “get your data” and that download includes most, if not all, of the kinds of information we expect a Data Lifeboat to contain. And, we want to take it two steps further, from an archival point of view:

1. Allow creators to make Data Lifeboats that can contain other people’s images (with permission, and that’s very, very gnarly), and
2. We plan to develop ‘known places’ for Data Lifeboats to land, so they can be registered or even accessioned as bonafide objects of meaningful cultural value. We’re calling those landing places Docks. That work is probably going to start in earnest in 2025.

In our ideal world, these docks will live inside our great and good cultural organizations, spreading the load, responsibility, and acknowledgement that our digital, user-generated cultural heritage is valuable and worthy of the attention and care our archives, museums, and libraries can provide. Jenn’s recent deeper dive into this is worth your time.

Building steadily

Our prototyping stage is nearly done now, within which we expect to come out with some Data Lifeboats to look at and critique, some “prototype policies” for Flickr members, Data Lifeboat creators, and possible “dock” operators. We are also doing some foundational work on models for sustainability, because, as you will know, to date, we’ve been largely quite bad at planning for long term life for our digital projects.

Thank you

A huge thank you to Jenn and Ewa for your fantastic support getting the grant application done, and to the team at Mellon for such constructive feedback.

Flickr is an important piece of social history that pioneered user-driven curation, through folksonomic tags and through a publicly-accessible platform at scale, crystallising the web 2.0 internet. Applying tags to one’s own images and those of others, Flickr’s users significantly contributed to the emergence of commons culture. These collective practices became a core tenet of Flickr’s design ethos as a platform, decentralising and democratising the role of curation.

Of course, Flickr was not alone in pioneering this—hashtags and social sharing on other platforms added momentum to the general shift which was overall democratising by giving users agency over what they shared, experienced, and categorised. This shift in curatorial agency is just one aspect of Flickr’s significance as a living piece of social history.

Flickr continues to be one of the largest public collections of photographs on the planet, comprising tens of billions of images. Flickr celebrated its 20th birthday in February 2024. The challenge of archiving Flickr at scale, then, perhaps becomes about designing processes for preservation which can also be decentralised.

In August 2023, I learnt from a dear friend and colleague, Dan Pett, that the Flickr Foundation, newly based in London, was beginning to build an innovative archival practice for the platform. With my interest in digital cultural memory systems, an interest for which I have moved continents, I was determined to contribute in some way to the Foundation’s new goal. After exploring and discussing the space with George Oates, Director of the Flickr Foundation, we agreed that a practice-based information-gathering exercise could be useful in building up an understanding of such a practice.

So, what would an archive for Flickr look like?

Flickr is a living social media environment, with up to 25 million images uploaded each day. The reality of the company’s being acquired by a number of different parent companies over the course of its 20-year lifetime—already a remarkable timespan by social media standards—additionally brings to the forefront a stark case for working to ensure the availability of its contents into the long future. This is a priority shared today between Flickr itself and the new Flickr Foundation.

I have prepared a report of findings, written over a deliberately slow period and which aims to present a colloquial yet current answer to the question of archival practice for Flickr as a unique case, both when it comes to scale and defining what should be prioritised for preservation. Presuming that the platform is not invulnerable to media obsolescence, what on earth (or space) should an archive preserving the best of Flickr look like today? The work of asking this question again and again through the days, months, years, and decades to come leads us to the Foundation’s own question: what does it look like to ensure Flickr lasts for one hundred years?

→ REPORT: 20 Years of Flickr: Archiving the Living Environment

This information-gathering exercise consisted of seven interviews with sector peers across a wide range of practice, from academia to a small company, to a global design practice and within the museum world. My sincere thanks to:

• Alex Seville (Head of Flickr),
• Cass Fino-Radin (Small Data Industries),
• Richard Palmer (V&A Museum),
• Annet Dekker (University of Amsterdam),
• Jenny Basford (British Library),
• Matthew Hoerl (Arch Mission Foundation), and
• Julie May (Bjarke Ingels Group)

Many thanks for taking the time to generously share their thoughts on the prospect, reflections on their own work, and expertise in the area.

The report sets out to define the value of what should be preserved for Flickr, as (1) a social platform, (2) a network-driven community, (3) a collection of uniquely user-generated metadata, and (4) as an invaluable image collection, specifically of photography. It then proceeds through a discussion of risks identified through the course of interviews. Finally, it proceeds through ten identified areas of practice which can be addressed in the Foundation’s archival plan, divided into long- and short-term initiatives. The report closes with six recommendations for the present.

An archive for Flickr which honours its considerable legacy should be created in the same vein. One interviewee reflected that the work of the archivist is to select what to preserve. This is, effectively, curation – the curation of archival material. It follows then, that if a central innovation of Flickr as a platform was to democratise the application of curatorial tools – enabling tags as metadata based in natural language, at scale – then the approach to archiving such a platform should follow this model in allowing its selection to be driven by users. What about a “preserve” tag?

Thanks to Flickr and other internet pioneers, this is far from any kind of revolutionary idea – and is one worth creating an archival practice around, so that coming generations can access the stories we want to tell about Flickr: the story of the internet, of the commons, of building open structures to find new images and of what it means to be a community, online.

What’s drawn you to family archives?

For a class on research-creation methods (also referred to as arts-based research) I took in 2019, I had big ambitions of creating an experimental, non-narrative documentary using cellphone footage during a planned trip to my parents’ home country of Malaysia. Upon returning home and examining the footage, I unfortunately came to the realization that a combination of obsolete technology (an iPhone 4S in the year of the iPhone 11 – imagine!!!), corrupted sound, and sabotage by my own, unsteady hands rendered my footage unusable. Scrambling to find some way to complete my term project in the final weeks of the semester, I decided to undergo what I saw as an intrapersonal reflection via an investigation of my own family archives. 

These “archives” are fairly small. Limited to the albums of photos my parents once carefully categorized and now just haphazardly store in a pile on a basement shelf. I confess that when living with my parents as a child, I was too self-centred to pay attention to any of the albums that didn’t include me. As the firstborn and only a year after my parents’ marriage, effectively I was prominently featured in all the albums except one. Paging through the album documenting my parents’ courtship, wedding, and first year of marriage, I was embarrassed by my shock of confronting these two people, whom I’ve evidently known my whole life, living this whole other life without me. As I passed on to the albums of my infancy, I became overcome with emotion seeing them making their life together, still virtually strangers having had an arranged marriage and finding themselves shortly thereafter in a new country, facing what I know now as the pressures that come with being not only new parents, but new immigrants, newly coupled, and struggling with finding lasting employment. 

Inspired by my reaction to these albums, I planned on conducting an oral history interview with my parents. I wanted to know the people in these photos, what they were thinking, feeling, doing. Yet there was something holding me back. The photos were so intimate, often only one of them in the shot, as the other was behind the camera. These felt like private moments between the two of them that was solely theirs to wholly know and experience. Instead, I took a selection of these photos and wrote my own reflections. Searching back through my own memories of the rare times my parents spoke about their youth and the early years of their marriage, I pieced together a history of their early settlement and parenthood in Canada (circa 1991-1995) through written reflections and image descriptions I then inscribed on the digitized copies of the photos. I’m usually not a very emotionally expressive person, but I cried when I presented this to my class. 

This experience fundamentally changed my relationship to photo archives and sowed the seeds for what would become my master’s thesis South Asian Instagram Community Archives: A Platform for Performance, Curation, and Identity as well as my approach to creative and poetic visual description for blind and low-vision communities as workshopped in the online exhibitions Audio Description in the Making and Air, River, Sea, Soil: A History of an Exploited Land. 

Continuing this line of engagement along with my community archival engagement approaches prototyped in the community digital archive/exhibition project Things+Time,

What would you like to work on during your fellowship?

I will, over the course of my fellowship at the Flickr Foundation, work with two community organizations, one based in London, UK and one in Montreal, Canada to undergo a digital archival excavation workshop. Through a series of guided prompts and reflections, these community groups will decide specific search criteria in order to activate the Flickr archive, creating informal collections that respond to and inform the earlier reflections. Together, community members will create descriptions for the images that can dually serve as archival and visual descriptions for potential use in a future exhibition.

Using a “photovoice” methodology, participants will also be tasked with adding their own, related and annotated material to the Flickr archive in response to the collective and reflections feedback from the workshop.

The goals of this project are to engage community organizations with the creative possibilities afforded through archival and photo research as well as to unearth and activate some of the rich histories embedded in the Flickr archive.