Creative Archives

Flickr can do things in ways traditional archives can’t: discuss.

About the program

The whole Flickr corpus is simply massive—tens of billions of digital objects, and growing every day. It’s one of the biggest image collections humans have ever created. Its huge scale makes it difficult to look after, let alone preserve.

Creative Archives investigates accessible tactics around ethics of care, decentralization, social or local archives, explorable formats, and machine-based support. 

We’re interested in archiving the foundation itself too, from the start.

An Interview with Tosin Adeosun, Founder & Curator of African Style Archive

Meet Tosin Adeosun as she details her experiences as a digital curator, managing care and loss in user-generated archives and shares some of her favorites from the Flickr Commons collection.

Welcome, Anna!

Anna will be joining us on an AHRC PhD placement from University College London to support on Data Lifeboat research.

Greetings, Oreoluwa! Introducing our next 2025 Research Fellow

Oreoluwa Akinyode joins us as our second Research Fellow of 2025, exploring the historic interplay of West African photography and textiles.