We are Emily Fitzgerald and Molly Sherman, mothers, artists, and educators based in Portland, Oregon, and San Antonio, Texas. We are excited to embark on our Flickr Foundation Research Fellowship.

For the past decade, we have collaborated on projects exploring themes of intergenerational relationships, housing, family, and care. With backgrounds in social practice, design, and photography, we create public platforms that foster reciprocal exchange and invite active audience engagement. Our work explores the process of collective storytelling, balancing the relational and the aesthetic, and making conceptual and visual decisions collaboratively. Central to our practice is the notion of co-authorship, where the ‘subject’ is also a partner in the creative process. Through this approach, we aim to build structures that promote care, connection, and dialogue.

Over the past many years our personal experiences with miscarriage, abortion, infertility, high-risk pregnancy, disability, single parenting, and IVF have shaped and reframed our work.. These themes are deeply woven into the fabric of our practice and have led us to create the People’s Clinic for Reproductive Empathy. The People’s Clinic for Reproductive Empathy, a project that explores reproductive experiences as a spectrum rather than isolated events, reflecting the varied journeys many individuals face throughout their lives—from infertility to pregnancy, abortion, miscarriage, menopause, and parenthood.

As Research Fellows, we will curate a comprehensive collection of images from Flickr that captures the past 20 years of digital storytelling and uniquely locates the vast spectrum of reproductive experience into a single collection.

We will create a collection that ethically represents the interconnected aspects of the reproductive spectrum and builds understanding around the diverse journeys shared by an overwhelming number of people. Our research will explore how cultural, political, and personal identities impact agency and health across the spectrum of reproductive experiences—such as abortion, miscarriage, infertility, queer conception, motherhood, disability, IVF, pregnancy, and breastfeeding. We will establish parameters to ensure inclusivity across race, class, gender, and age and carefully consider the ethics of representation and image-making in our visual and conceptual decision-making throughout this fellowship, along with the way photography has been used to reflect, mobilize, and build networks and movements throughout history.

Our research will culminate in the form of a photobook. The contents of the photobook will include hundreds of Flickr images and an appendix of selected metadata associated with each image—preserving a highly accessible digital collection and elevating it as an archival object. We will build the digital collection to ensure that the metadata is reflective of our research and accessible to a greater public, while examining the project’s potential relationship with the Flickr Foundation’s Data Lifeboat project.

The photobook will include oral history interviews with past and present leaders in the fight for reproductive rights and care. These texts will frame the themes represented through the images. The publications will provide an innovative approach to image making and a renewed perspective on archives, including methods of collective and counter archiving. Our research and the publication will explore the boundaries and accessibility of photographic archives, highlight silenced and hidden narratives, and visualize the spectrum of reproductive experience shared by women across history, geography, race, and class.

As you may know, we had laid out doing two workshops:

1. Washington DC, at The Library of Congress, in October, and
2. London, at the Garden Museum and Autograph Gallery, in November.

We were pleased to welcome a total of 32 people across the events, from libraries, archives, academic institutions, the freelance world, other like-minded nonprofits, Flickr.com, and Flickr.org.

Now we are doing the work of sifting through the bazillion post-its and absorbing the great conversations had as we worked through Tori’s fantastic program for the event. We were all very well-fed and organized too, thanks to Ewa’s superb project management. Thank you both.

Workshop aims

The aims of each workshop were the same:

• Articulate the value of archiving social media, and Data Lifeboat
• Detail where Data Lifeboat fits in current ecology of tools and practices
• Detail where Data Lifeboat fits with curatorial approaches and content delivery
• Plot (and recognise) the type and amount of work it would take to establish Data Lifeboat or similar in organisations

Workshop outline

We met these aims by lining up the workshops into different sessions:

1. Foundations of Long-Term Digital Preservation – Backward/forward horizons; understanding digital infrastructures; work happening in long-term digital preservation
2. Data Lifeboat: What we’re thinking so far – Reporting on our NEH work to prototype software and policy, including a live demo; positioning a Data Lifeboat in emergency/not-emergency scenarios; curation needs or desires to use Data Lifeboats as selection/acquisition tool
3. Consent and Care in Social Media Archiving – Ethics of care in digital archives; social context and care vs extractive data practices; mapping ethical rights, risks, responsibilities including copyright and data protection, and consent, and
4. Characteristics of a Robust & Responsible Safe Harbor Network (our planned extension of the Data Lifeboat concept – think LOCKSS-ish) – The long history of safe harbor networks; logistics of such a network; Trust.

I’m not going to report on these now, but whet your appetite for our further reporting back.

Background readings

Tori also prepared some grounding readings for the event, which we thought others may like to review:

• The Archival Sliver: A Perspective on the Construction of Social Memory in Archives and the Transition from Apartheid to Democracy by Verne Harris
• Energy, Digital Preservation, and the Climate: Proactively Planning for an Uncertain Future by Sibyl Schaefer
• The Image As Witness: Collecting Visual Materials from the National Tragedy by Jeremy Adamson
• Digital Preservation: A Critical Vocabulary, Chapter 5: Risk by Rebecca Frank
• “I Can’t Wait for You to Die” A Community Archives Critique by Harrison Apple

Needless to say, we all enjoyed it very much, and heard the same from our attendees. Several follow-on chats have been arranged, and the community continues to wiggle towards each other.

Last week we passed a big milestone set out in the Strategy 2021-2023 – Flickr Commons Revitalization I wrote in 2021. As the strategy says, when the Commons launched in 2008, the program had two main objectives:

1. To increase public access to archival photography collections, and
2. To provide a way for the general public to contribute information and knowledge.

Our current work to reinvigorate the program introduces two new ones: 

1. To propagate updates from and to member catalogs and other sources, and
2. To protect and attend to the long life of this unique collection.

Even though it’s now 2024, we are still on the track we set out back in 2021. After doing research with Commons members to inform the strategy, we heard five main requests:

1. Add new Discovery layer and encourage contribution – We launched commons.flickr.org earlier in the year, and have continued to develop it with recent activity, an overview of conversations about the pictures, and a simple map. Alex made a changelog too, so you can see how it evolves.
2. Co-design granular, comparative, exportable stats – The company launched an enhancement to the core stats feature on Flickr.com November last year, which got most of the way to helping Flickr Commons members report to their people on how people are interacting with their accounts. Being able to justify your time to work on Flickr.com and community engagement inside museums, libraries, and archives is supported by this directly.
3. Improve description tools for regular researchers – We haven’t started on this in earnest yet, and hope to in 2025. (Would you like to be in our user group for this? Please get in touch.)
4. Incorporate CC0 and Public Domain Mark (PDM) – This is not done yet, but we have been advocating for the upgrade of CC 2.0 to CC 4.0 which is now a work in progress. We have also created a Collections Development Policy and other supporting content to help guide new members on what ‘no known copyright restrictions’ means and how to use it.
5. Streamline onboarding to easily manage members and participation – We are excited to be working with the company on developing new Commons-specific APIs to allow our team to build out new administration tools for the program. This will continue in 2025, and make everything much easier!

New members!

For the first time in several years, we’ve welcomed three new Commons members to the fold:

• Community Archives of Belleville & Hastings County
• Letterform Archive
• Port Morien Digital Archive

And we have a tranche of new members in the wings, ready to go, including our first member from India!

Seventeen years!

Flickr Commons was launched in 2008, so will be turning 17 in January. It was lovely for some of our team to visit with Michelle, Helena, Phil, and others in The Library of Congress Commons team last week. We were there for a Data Lifeboat workshop, and it was great to dream about what the next sixteen years could be like together! (We’ll be writing the workshops up separately.)

So, keep an eye out for more new members coming aboard, and if you work inside a cultural organization with a photography collection, get in touch to see if joining Flickr Commons could help your organization grow a new audience. (Short answer: it can!)

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.