Visual history in the hands of the people

I have been strongly in favor of what I have called, for lack of a better term, "in situ preservation" of vernacular photographs. The idea for this slowly emerged out of my experiences with my own family photographs. There were several generations of photographers among the branches of our family tree, starting with my grandfather, my grandmother attended photographic school and worked in the darkroom at her husband's studio and had an early fascination with photography as a child, her favorite uncle was a photographer. Her father's mother's brother was a well known and successful 19th century photographer and stereoview publisher, whose three sons went on to become photographers. We inherited a wealth of photographic heritage and a vast treasure of old photographs. I grew up around photography as a child, not intensely as perhaps a child of a concert pianist might grow up around constant music and the grand piano in the living room, but absorbed this heritage by osmosis.

I slowly learned over the decades the importance of the photographs we possessed, as they gathered in our own family collection, as we inherited each group of photographs, some were family while others were of historical value, of localities where our ancestors lived in past times. Although I held the institutions that are entrusted with the task of keeping our memories, our past alive, through preservation and sharing of artifacts in high regard, I began to sense early on that these institutions were limited. There was a vast quantity of vernacular images, which for many reasons were ignored by museums and libraries. Because these images were not considered "important" they remained in ordinary people's homes. I began to see this as a good thing, since artifacts collected into a single location "put all the eggs in one basket" and sometimes were destroyed along with it, perhaps with a fire or a war, this has happened throughout history. It is frequently the rare item, the significant historical find, that comes from the attic of an ordinary home, the old heirloom that someone saved in a drawer or the odd thing tossed in the attic without any knowledge of its importance, that comes to play an important role in telling the story of our past. I started to conclude that it was sometimes better for artifacts to remain outside the institutional framework and when I started to learn more about institutions, archives and libraries, I understood that it was impossible for them to store, catalog and preserve all the potentially significant artifacts, especially vernacular photographs.

This idea of in situ preservation dawned on me in the late 1970s as a vague idea and by 1995 was nearly fully formed, inspired by my taking a second look at our oldest family photographs, which I had copied once about 1980 while still an enthusiastic young photography student. I discovered and became aware of a vast world of vernacular photographs being bought and sold by collectors and at flea markets, I saw here and there several "finds" of historic documents or images that shed new light for historians on events they thought were settled. I learned new things about my own family through researching our own photographs, which had both genealogical and vernacular historical value. I sought to take an academic approach to our family photographs, by carefully cataloging, recording and preserving the images as a librarian or archivist might do, not as the genealogist would with their concentration on family. (A side note: My interest in family photographs was met repeatedly with great resistance from some genealogists, throughout the period 1995 to about 2005 when all the photo sharing sites started up...I was told at least once that names were the important thing in genealogy not photographs. This perception has greatly changed for the better in the last decade).

As the digital age dawned and the Internet became available to the public, I began to see that it was possible to coordinate, encourage and support this activity of "in situ" preservation of vernacular images. I had already seen that it was happening, that it frequently was an important way of ensuring the preservation of important artifacts, sometimes because they were not recognized as significant until many decades later, and that this "cloud" of artifacts was too large and unknowable to be cared for by any single institution, perhaps not even all institutions collectively. I thought that an online database could be employed to help catalog and track these in situ objects, collect data on them for use by researchers. I eventually built the City Gallery website with these goals in mind and over the years made various attempts to involve people in this project. I had little success because I never made it part of an existing activity. It was only by 1997 or so I began to recognize that people are not going to enter information about their photographs stored in shoeboxes. It is just too much work. I understood that they would contribute images to an album, to share photographs, and that might be a way build such a database of vernacular photographs stored in situ. This was at the time very difficult for an individual to create due to storage and bandwidth costs.

My reach fell short of my ideas for a large part because I lacked an understanding of what motivated people, what I could get them to do, what they were doing already. If I wanted ordinary people to scan their vernacular photographs and upload them to my photo sharing system (this was before shutterfly and other sites existed) and describe them using meta data, this was simply too much to ask. In the UK, they have something called Archive Day (and there may be similar projects here) where people bring their photographs to an institution to have them scanned by librarians. The feeling of civic duty and participation in something larger than themselves encourages people to participate, and they don't have to do the technically difficult work of scanning the images. Yes, by now the consumer scanner is ubiquitous, but still most ordinary people have difficulty using them and generally like the photographic enthusiast of a few decades ago, the family photos are usually scanned by one particular individual in the family. So this is one way in which this can really work. The drawback is that it involves an institution, which must scan, store and catalog, obviating to a great degree the advantage of in situ preservation.

I have to conclude that "in situ" may not be the ideal form of preservation, but it will continue to be a necessary one, it will continue to exist, for the simple reason that we do not now know what artifacts are important or will become important in time to historians and there are not enough institutions in the world to store the artifacts. It may be that this process is such a complex, organic phenomena that it cannot be supported and encouraged, since we do not know what artifacts will be important to future generations. I still believe it is worthwhile to pursue social and technological ways to support and encourage ordinary people to preserve what they believe is important to them hoping that it will with it preserve what is important to history.