Transcript

What is the Flickr Foundation Up To?

A transcript of the first Flickr Foundation Conversation held online on September 26, 2024, with George Oates, Director of Flickr.org, and foundation advisors Anasuya Sengupta and Eliza Gregory.

Introduction and Background of the Flickr Foundation

George Oates: My name is George Oates, and I’m the executive director of the Flickr Foundation. We’re a fairly young, not-for-profit organization. You can learn more about us at Flickr.org. If you’ve joined us for the first Flickr Foundation conversation, you likely already know a bit about us. Providing a brief overview of our creation story might be interesting.

I worked at Flickr.com when it started back in 2003. I was the very first web interface designer and co-wrote the community guidelines with a community master called Heather Champ. Those first few years of Flickr were, in my opinion, a very special time on the internet. This was before the titanic corporations we are living with today entered the mix, and people were simply sharing their lives through the power of photography and friendly conversation.

In 2007-2008, I created a program called Flickr Commons, initially in partnership with the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress was looking for what they called a “web 2.0 partner” – a place outside its online catalog to share its amazing collection. They wanted to become part of a community and engage the general public and photography fans worldwide with their content. 

But then, in 2008, Yahoo, the owner of Flickr at the time, decided that the Flickr Commons, and especially my position running it, wasn’t valuable to them. So they laid me off.   It was that moment when a corporation wondered what this thing was for because it wasn’t generating any revenue. It generated a whole ton of good vibes and built a fan base and community around these amazing photography collections, but some spreadsheet had a red number somewhere, so they dissolved my role.

It was at that time when I began to imagine a separate organization that wasn’t about profit, that could live alongside the company like a sister who could say things a company can’t about long term survival.

Eliza Gregory: That’s a great introduction. Since we got some of your background through that story, George, which was wonderful, Anasuya, could you introduce yourself? I could preface it by mentioning you’re a Rhodes Scholar and the founder of Whose Knowledge?, an incredible organization with many programs I’m just learning about and can’t wait to dive into more deeply. But what else would you like to add? Welcome.

Decolonizing the Internet and Knowledge Justice

Anasuya Sengupta: Thank you for being here, old and new friends. I often try to omit The Rhodes Scholar piece from my bio. However, I will say this: I once said in public at a meeting Venkat attended when we held a “Decolonizing the Internet” conference in 2018 Cape Town with 100 people that my entire life’s work has been a rebuttal to Cecil Rhodes. This conference was the start of our journey in many ways. It included fabulous academics, artists, activists, techies, journalists, archivists, and memory workers worldwide. I am part of a feminist collective called Whose Knowledge?, which we see as being at the intersections of knowledge and tech justice. We think of it as a global and trans-local multilingual campaign where urgency is not necessarily speed but the urgency of ensuring that the histories, knowledges, leadership, and imaginations of those of us who are minoritized by structures of power and privilege -are at the center of how we think about knowledge infrastructures, including and especially the internet.

The Power of Photography in Justice-Centered Practices

Eliza: Thank you so much. Welcome to you. I am Eliza Gregory. I am a Professor of Photography at Sacramento State University in California and an artist as well. I started as a photographer and became a social practice artist as I tried to solve problems with the limitations of photography for a justice-centered art practice. I try to think a lot about representation and justice and what are the myths around photography that we operate inside of. How do we push back against those? How do we lean into what photography can do? We must also acknowledge what it can’t do and try to be a little strict with ourselves about that.

I’m also just an enthusiast for the Flickr Foundation. I’m excited about the questions this work raises and thrilled to be here and participate in this conversation. So, thanks for having me.

Flickr’s 100-Year Plan: Preserving a Cultural Legacy

Eliza: George, I wanted to ask about one more thing regarding the foundation, especially since it’s been evolving. It’s a moving target: the 100-year plan. How you have discussed this in the past is clear to me, and it’s what I hold onto. It’s this idea that we have more than 50 billion images, and that is not just a website but a bonafide site of cultural heritage. So what does it mean to conserve that? How are we going to do that? Where’s your thinking at the moment with that question?

George: I wrote this mission for the Flickr Foundation: to keep Flickr pictures visible for 100 years. I want to unpack that because it was very intentional. The key word for me is “visible.” Keeping a digital thing visible for a long time is very difficult. Visibility is also an aspect of preservation. You’ve got to be able to access things that have been preserved; otherwise, it’s like the “if a tree falls in the forest” scenario.

With digital content, we’re preserving a few too many things that nobody looks at ever again. So, I’m challenging that with the word “visible” in the sentence. I also deliberately picked the time scale because 100 years is only for a while. Our great cultural institutions worldwide speak of forever, giving them a different stance. But I wanted to be able to conceive a future that’s not so far away.

One hundred years might be ten generations of leadership at the foundation, which involves many staff members moving through. Also, 100 years is impossible to predict from a technological point of view. Dr. Temi Odumosu said to me in the early days, “We don’t even know what a JPEG is going to be in ten years or if we’re going to still have them, so can we plan to preserve 50 billion of them for 100 years?”

Challenges and Opportunities in Digital Preservation

George: Immediately, we need to reframe our thinking regarding renewal, succession, and transition. The technology challenge kind of slides off the frame, in my opinion, or becomes a renewal process. This has made me interested in concepts like ‘physicalization.’ What does it mean to have such a vast, born-digital situation that’s so fragile when you think about it? Does it behoove us to print stuff?

I’ve spoken to a sales representative who works at a microfiche printing company, and I’m wondering if microfiche is coming back. He told me that the solution needed to print that material is rare now, and there’s only one place that makes it: Fujifilm in Japan. It’s only manufactured once per year, and unless you’re at the door asking for a barrel of the goop, you don’t get any.

So then, of course, I’m thinking about finding a chemistry department somewhere to reconstitute whatever the solution is. You can see that I’m not thinking about technology in that instinct at all. Having the 100-year outlook means it’s not a technology problem anymore. It’s a social problem. It’s a socio-political problem. And, of course, money is an issue, but money’s always an issue. I still don’t know what to do about that; it’s just between you and me. But we’re working on it, and we’re not even two years old yet, so we’re just a baby in the grand scheme of 100 years. I’m cutting us a bit of slack.

Eliza: That’s great. I love the intersection of socialness and technology and how those things ask questions of each other. Anasuya, I wanted to ask you to put your lens, the lens of your work, onto this question. Specifically, how do you think recognizing and preserving digital cultural heritage can contribute to decolonizing the internet and shift us away from global racial and class hierarchies or socioeconomic hierarchies?

How can the act of recognizing and preserving digital cultural heritage contribute to decolonizing the internet?

Anasuya: Thank you for that, Eliza. I’m seriously considering what George talks about regarding this not being a technological problem. It’s precisely the entry point for us when we think about decolonizing the internet. It’s not a technological problem; it’s an issue of power. It’s about who has the power, what kind of power, and recognizing that power is not static. So it’s not a binary of who has and doesn’t have power, but who has what forms of power, in what spaces, and what rooms of what kinds.

And what does that mean for the way we remember, for how we choose to remember, what we choose to remember, and also the right to refusal the right to opacity at the same time as the right to transparency? When you think about minoritized communities – and I’m using that phrase deliberately, too, just as George likes making up words, we like making up words as well – we use “minoritized” because it’s the act of minoritizing. It’s the act of marginalizing that is happening to communities that are otherwise the majority of the world.

The cultural artifacts of who we are, what we’ve been, and what we imagine ourselves to be are in a minority because of the way colonial capitalism has played out and other forms of systems of oppression – patriarchy, homophobia, all the isms, and their intersections. So when you look at something like Flickr, and you consider that George said it nearly disappeared because there was a spreadsheet somewhere with a red mark, which I think is a very poignant visual metaphor, many of our lives are literally that. On the precipice of being forgotten, not by us and not by our bodies and not by our transgenerational memories, but by those who are witnesses. For many of our communities, there are not even witnesses.

Flickr.com, in a very real way, is a gathering of memory.

Anasuya: Something like Flickr.com is a gathering of memory in a very real and material way. It’s a gathering of memory from around the world, from many different kinds of people, many different forms of politics, and many different forms of knowledge production. Memory is knowledge. One of the interesting things is we don’t use the word “culture” very often because, as Argentinian semiotician Walter Mignolo once asked, “Why is it that for some people knowing is knowledge and for other people knowing is culture?” What we call culture and what we call knowledge is a really good question to ask. Therefore, we just talk about multiple forms of knowledge, pluralities of knowledge.

For instance, when there are trans women selfies on Flickr from the 2010s, or when there are both photographs of police repression in a protest and the spaces of joy and resistance in that protest on Flickr, when there are memories of a land that indigenous communities are fighting to preserve on Flickr, but it may not exist anymore because the state has taken over or the ocean has taken over, Flickr then becomes – and in some ways, Wikimedia Commons, and I’ll come back to the connection between them later – not just a commons of photographs, it becomes a commons of our shared knowledges, our shared memories.

The thing that I want to say here, which I think is important, is that this is where the profit, colonial capitalist infrastructure comes in. We often think about scale as many things of the same kind, sort of Adam Smith’s pin factory. But in this case, the beauty of Flickr is its plurality, the many long tails. It’s the fact that there is a small community somewhere, or ten photographs of the Bangalore Pride in 2008 that I can go back to. And that then becomes these billions and billions of photographs that we can all visually see.

Yes, searchability and discovery is both a technical and a social political problem, as George said. But just the fact that they exist, as Audre Lorde said, “We who are not meant to survive,” we can exist in a place like Flickr matters. Because for many of us, the visual is the way that we have told our stories. The visual and the oral are the way that we’ve told our stories. Of the 8000 languages in the world, only about 4000 actually have a script. And many of those scripts are actually colonially imposed scripts. We are, by and large, a planet of orality and visuality. And so that makes what we have at Flickr a repository of memory and knowledge in a way that we don’t often acknowledge.

Collaborative Efforts for a Sustainable Digital Future

Eliza: I love it. You’ve got me thinking about so many things. I love that you’re talking about the commons, and I’ll throw it back to you, George, and ask a little bit about your goals for the Flickr Commons. What tools and approaches are you exploring to expand participation and access and bring back that interactivity and engagement to that platform?

George: The Flickr Commons program, as I mentioned, turned 16 years old this year. There are about 2 million pictures in it, so it’s dwarfed by the bigger Flickr.com service where millions of users have added their photographs over 20 years. But there’s still, in my opinion, a need for the core goal we started Flickr Commons to meet in the first place, which is basically just to increase online access to photography collections held in these institutions. At a very simple level, that helps our cultural institutions achieve their missions, which is to let people use and see their stuff.

Now that the program’s sort of semi-mature, the numbers are really amazing. There have been billions of views of these pictures, even dwarfing loc.gov, for example. But there are also really tiny organizations in Flickr Commons, like one of my favorites, the Cloyne and District Historical Society. We know Ken, who takes the pictures that go in the archive, and he’s sharing these fantastic pictures from the ’50s and ’60s of, for example, the Easter parade with Cadillacs and the beauty queen in the front car.

For a practitioner like Ken, his digital capacity is limited. His money is limited. But if he makes use of this gigantic platform Flickr.com to share his stuff, suddenly he’s got a million views of that Easter parade. That very basic measure is success. It’s proven. My heart belongs to the little institutions and small museums. So anything we can do to give them a robust and free digital presence to increase access is easy and good work for us.

Our basic hope is to grow the membership. In the last decade or so, the national-scale organizations on the planet have matured digitally. They have different approaches to stuff like open licensing. So maybe the need that Flickr.com answered initially is addressed for them now. It’s not really met by Flickr anymore. I would argue that there’s definitely still a bigger audience at Flickr.com, so if they really do want to show their stuff, they still can. And there are deep community engagements with some of our Commons members.

So yeah, just basic growth of the program, making it available to more people, just doing marketing again and increasing the membership. Because the foundation can build software, we also can build ourselves tools to manage that membership and take care of registrations and all that type of stuff. It’s our premier program at the Flickr Foundation. We want to grow it. We want to make the tools for the members themselves and improve the tools for the community to keep an eye on activity and enjoy the pictures. Maybe we can help with some crowdsourcing stuff, like adding pictures to maps.

One of our mottos that floats around the team is “aim low and succeed often.” So I’m trying not to be too highfalutin about our goals. I just want to keep it simple. If we can add a few new members for the first time in five years before Christmas time this year, for me, that’s a huge win because it means the doors have opened again. The wheels are moving again, and then maybe next year we can add 10 or 20, and that’s great.

Eliza: I really see the value of what you’re talking about. I teach a course where I’m asking students to do some original scholarship on a set of photographs of their choosing. Of course, if they go to Google, which is the first port of call on the internet for so many of us, it cannot crawl all these collections. And if you don’t even know a small museum exists, that is precisely what you’re interested in; you can’t find it and look in its collection. So that is just a fundamental barrier there that you are removing for people like my students who are working class, first generation to college and have some different, exciting interests in different kinds of photographs. You’re making that happen for us, and that’s very exciting.

George: That’s really just the first reason to join the Commons, though. I think that for me personally, the more interesting stuff starts to happen when the community begins engaging with the material. So there’s simply looking at the pictures and enjoying that, but then we’ve had some just incredible stories about how people turn up at the Commons and they say, “Oh, wow, that’s my grandma. Her name is Agnes Margaret Glass. She lived on this street in Glasgow from this year to this year.” This kind of descriptive richness is basically very difficult for cultural institutions to produce on their own.

Actually now, because digitization has become so easy for a static photograph – you just take a picture of it and then you get a folder full of JPEGs – the description part is the real hard, time-consuming, expensive labor that cultural institutions face. So you’ve got this seesaw that’s tipped now in the last 20 years of digitization work, and now you’ve got all these sorts of undescribed materials.

Expanding Metadata: Human and Machine Collaboration

In the long term, looking into the next few years, I’m interested in that additive cycle, where the Flickr community can improve the metadata around these photographs, and possibly even machines can, too. 

I’ve been thinking of three types of metadata: you’ve got the objective stuff which is EXIF, like date taken and that type of stuff. Then you’ve got this very special type of metadata, which is Flickr-specific, which I’m calling social metadata – for example, Eliza favorited my photo, George put it in this group. And then a more speculative one is generative metadata, which actually loads of corporations are already chomping down on. But I’m sort of imagining a generated alt text label kind of thing. It’s sort of, dare I say, an objective description of the subjects of a photograph. We’ve run a few experiments and actually, it’s pretty good most of the time with human intervention. So obviously, we would step warily into that one. But as long as it’s clearly labeled as machine-generated and talked about, we would be very careful to do that responsibly. 

The point is, I’m interested in the return of an improved access copy back into the catalog because that’s just going to be better all around. In particular, because you’ve got not just one expert describing the photograph, maybe even without any subject knowledge, you might have one, two, three, four, ten people describing it instead. And that doesn’t really happen in our cultural institutions that much.

Eliza: That’s a big paradigm shift regarding the gatekeeping of information and incentives for locating information. So actually, Anasuya, I wanted to ask you to weigh in on that. You probably have some things to add there. And specifically, I’m wondering how you see the foundation, what would you like to see the foundation do to sort of reach their full potential in terms of decolonizing the internet through this mechanism?

Decolonizing Metadata and Self-Defined Provenance

Anasuya: One of the most important things that George said, around the metadata and around the humanly created metadata that is important about what Flickr offers us and offers minoritized communities of all kinds, is this is provenance in the way we want to describe it. It’s a self-defined context for this snapshot of time, of place, of memory, of whatever kind of person.

I’m going to use an example from work that we do just to ground it a little bit. One of the things that we do that George has been part of is we run an annual campaign called the #VisibleWikiWomen campaign. We do it because for many of us, as we know, the Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects are the largest open and openly created repositories of that kind. And yet if you look at Wikipedia and you sort of do some datafication, run the data on it, you find that only 25% of all biographies are of women or non-binary folks. Only 20% of those have images or photographs of any kind.

So the invisibility of women, of non-binary folks, of those of us from the global South or the global majority is deep. And if it’s deep on Wikipedia and its sister projects, then of course, that travels across the internet because as Google pulls its knowledge graph, that’s where it’s pulling a lot of material from. It’s pulling it from Flickr.

There’s a very clear need for us to have agency to decide what we put online. Last year our theme was body plurality, and we did a wonderful partnership with a South African queer organization called the Forum for Empowerment of Women. The Soweto Pride has been going on since 2004. There was no Wikipedia article till this year, 20 years after it began, and there were no photographs of Soweto Pride till we invited a non-binary photographer, Ayanda Mziza, to take those photographs.

Visibility and Agency in Digital Archives

Anasuya: Last year at the pride, the first place we put the photos was not Wikimedia Commons. We put them on Flickr. The reason is that it did two things that are very important. One is it gives visibility to the non-binary photographer, just as George is saying, there’s something very important about visibility at all levels – from the image, the artifact itself and where it’s coming from and who it’s coming from, to the person whose creation it is and then to whom it reaches. At all levels there are power and access issues and questions to ask.

So Ayanda Mziza, the non-binary photographer from Johannesburg, took these photographs. We put them on Flickr first. We could describe in a much more nuanced way what it was about, where it was from, and give them that attribution very clearly and then move them to Wikimedia Commons. The act of doing that, starting with Flickr, was, I think, a very important political act. It’s a very important way to think about Flickr’s role in making sure that those who look like us and others who are minoritized in different ways are able to self-define.

So yes. George and I nerd out about metadata in many other ways, but that self-definition, the self-definition of context, of provenance, of the primacy of the reason for this memory, for this artifact needs to be from those who have created it and from those who it’s about. And as we know, in most cases, especially in colonial capitalist institutions of memory, GLAM institutions, that is not true. That provenance, that metadata is never actually created by those of whom it is about and through whom it has come.

So that power is deeply significant. And I think the piece that we need to keep working on is even as we invite more and more people to join Flickr, join the Commons, how do we preserve this self-definition at scale? What does that look like?

Eliza: That is a great term. I love that. I also think, you know, what both of you are talking about that I’m understanding is, we need to feel seen. There’s so much about that that makes us reach our full humanity when we feel seen. And Flickr is allowing that to happen. But there’s also this tension between scale and capacity to feel seen. So figuring out what are the pathways, who is seeing me, how do I know that I’m seen? How do I access and find a way to see other groups of people, other individuals?

It strikes me that that’s sort of the heart of some of these questions in terms of how the foundation creates pathways through the collection. And George, you were talking about that with making physical prints or letting certain things go. So, how do we know what to let go of? How do we know how to help people find what they need as well as what they want?

Content Mobility: Tracing the Journey of a Photograph

George: Let me start by saying I’m not sure we should keep all 50 billion because there’s a lot of crap on Flickr. We don’t need all that. Let that photo of that sandwich I took in 2006 go. Nobody needs that. But one of the programs we’ve set up at the Flickr Foundation is called Content Mobility. This is the study of where a photograph comes from, what happens to the photograph when it lives on Flickr, and then where it goes once it leaves.

 We’re trying to be really conscious of the idea that Flickr is not the final destination. In fact, maybe it’s just an access point, but it’s an access point where all kinds of annotation and addition and curation can happen to that picture. What we’re trying to do is see if we can design a way for all of that social activity and stuff to stay with the picture once it leaves Flickr. So you would learn multiple points of view, or you would hear Agnes talk to you about her grandma in that picture that the library didn’t know about, or you would hear how that photograph has been enjoyed  in that place, Flickr.

I think it’s crazy to believe that we can keep all 50 billion. Attrition is normal and should be. Selection, as you well know, is such an important part of an archivist’s job as well. Even though you say at the front door, “Sure, we’ll take everything you’ve got,” you’re also like, “Actually, we don’t need that apron. We’re a photography archive.”

Curation, Attrition, and the Future of Digital Archives

Eliza: It’s big for that question. I don’t know the answer. I don’t know what to say in response, but I think that is such a great question. And that’s what’s important. Partly, the instinct to keep photographs is driven by how they can stimulate memory, leading to storytelling. And we use them as a crutch in a way, and sometimes they end up replacing memory.

Some of that is this kind of shifting cultural norms where we’ve forgotten how to remember things and tell stories, and we’ve become so divorced from ritual and connection to land that we have very little capacity for intergenerational communication, especially between generations that are not next to each other. So all of that just feels like an entry point into really, really interesting, important questions.

George: Is that like a foundation conversation number two?

Eliza: Maybe. That would be great.

Anasuya: I’m in. I want to listen to that one.

Susan Mernit: Well, this has been a pleasure. I’m sorry to interrupt. We’re recording this. I’ll circle back with everybody and let you know when we have a transcript of the recording or other materials. I’m also going to assume that people will want to hear about upcoming events. So, if I email you and you don’t want to hear about them, just let me know, and I’ll take you off the list. 

But since this is our first one and you guys have been such a great audience, and this is really about building community and a two-way discussion, I’m not going to bombard you, but I definitely am excited to see these connections happening.

George: Well, thank you for coming, everybody. It’s been very fun. Thanks, Eliza, for hosting. Thank you, Susan, for organizing.

[The transcript ends with a few brief exchanges and farewells among the participants.]

 

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.

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