Advent Calendar – Flickr

Image sharing website Flickr is the subject of today’s Advent Calendar post, with perspectives from Tim Machin and Larissa Douglass.

Museums, galleries, heritage collections and Flickr by Tim Machin

Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount

Flickr has been enthusiastically embraced by a whole host of individuals and organisations. In particular, museums and art galleries have made exciting use of it. In the press recently were images of the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of exquisite dark-age metal work, unearthed in a field by a metal-detector enthusiast, and valued at over £3 million. These images, in a savvy move by the local museums concerned, were placed on Flickr, together with images of the crowds queuing outside to catch a first glimpse. Elsewhere this year, crowds again featured – this time, the round the block queues for Banksy vs Bristol museum, together with an evolving record of documenting Banksy’s continuing interventions in the Museum.

It’s easy to see why museums are keen to show how popular they are, and embed in public consciousness why something like the Staffordshire Hoard should remain on Mercian soil. And its not just these ticker-tape responses to breaking events that Flickr is well suited – it is after all crammed full of the output of various digitised collections, and august institutions such as the V&A have embraced it as a way of engaging with visitors, whilst the Dutch Nationaal Archief, has used its geotagging functions discover the location of hundreds of photographs taken in WW1. Indeed, Flickr has embraced this use – launching a project called ‘The Commons‘ to encourage and describe all (well, some) of this stuff.

A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s / by Sam Hood

But there’s something equally exciting going on outside the institutions. I’m going to ignore the countless ‘Museums of…’ which have cropped up on Flickr (for everything from unselected pools of images of graffiti to projects to ‘exhibit outside the academy’), and focus on the way that museum’s collections and gallery exhibits have been photographed by visitors (against the traditional gallery rules) and uploaded, and museums’ own feeds borrowed and remixed.

Singapore- no camera

Here we have groups exploring museums as social spaces, for example, Museums at Night and Museum Watchers. Other groups reunite collections or support new (or counter-hegemonic) narratives, for example transferring the Benin Bronzes of the British Museum into a symbol of modern Nigerian culture. More simply, Flickr lets lovers of Women of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, dogs in art and the curious bring together collections of art and objects. In a world of tagging and Creative Commons, ownership of the images as well as control of the way exhibits, collections and artefacts are represented, is questioned and the role of the institution (and the professional status of curators) is challenged.

V&A museum, Cast courts

Context, supported by scholarship, is everything in museums and galleries – setting objects into the place in a particular world view, or relating them to a cultural tradition – and as such, hotly contested. Once you kick away these kinds of supports, whether by allowing all users to tag and curate photos in groups, or giving visitors’ own photographs the same status as official documentation, you de-centre privileged (and expert) views of the objects. A space is opened up not just for alternative narratives, but their effective dissemination and (perhaps) eventual mainstream acceptance, but this is at the risk of substituting context for opinion. Pictures of dogs in art for well, just pictures of dogs.

Mark Dion, collection of specimens

In museums, this kind of thing already has a rich history – (non-expert) artists like Banksy, the Guerilla Girls, Fred Wilson and Mark Dion have been intervening and re-curating collections, both officially and unofficially for years, re-examining the academy from within, using its own mechanisms. Perhaps this is not yet happening in online communities in the same way – can the Guerilla Girls please sign up for Flickr?

guerrilla girls in Chelsea

See Intute for other academic resources in Museum, Library and Archive Studies.

Urbex “communities” on Flickr by Larissa Douglass
User-generated content becomes especially relevant to historical research through the Urban Exploration (Urbex) communities on Flickr and other photo-sharing sites. Urbex, a growing movement over the past two decades, began as amateur photographers spent weekends gaining entry to and photographing sealed and abandoned buildings, institutions and municipal structures, including hospitals, asylums, schools, churches, barracks, sewers, subways, mines, factories, military bunkers and air bases. Images in these collections, taken before demolition – or, more rarely, restoration – efforts, document the monumental changes of our era. Buildings which once constituted the monolithic infrastructure of the establishment have been unfunded and declared redundant or fallen into neglect. There are now Urbex communities in every major city in the developed world; and their photos testify to the trajectory of that development. On Flickr, pools of photos tagged as, ‘Decayed yet Hauntingly Beautiful‘, ‘The Light Painters Society’, ‘broken but loved’, ‘Urban Secret & Forgotten Places’, ‘Abandoned Places and Things’ and ‘Exploring the Megastructure’, enable Urbex groups to preserve the ongoing, hidden history of these sites.

The UK has a vibrant Urbex movement, with some cities even boasting their own organized groups, such as the Leeds Historical Expedition Society, founded by Phill Davison:

Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner, reproduced by kind permission of P. Davison

On Flickr, Davison’s work complements material available in formal research institutions. Where archival records stop, he and other contributors to Flickr’s Urbex communities complete the historical narrative. In the example of Chapel Allerton Hospital, Davison provides a ‘missing piece’ to the account of Gledhow Grove in Chapel Allerton, Leeds, designed as a stately home in Greek Revival style in the 1830s by John Hives Architect John Clark. Leodis, an online photographic archive managed by Leeds Library and Information Service and hosted by Leeds City Council, presents images of Gledhow Grove when it was still in good repair in 1950:

Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), reproduced by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net

Davison noted that the house has been left derelict since 1994, and recorded on Flickr its subsequent ruin in 2007:

"Grandeur" - Chapel Allerton Hospital (formerly Gledhow Grove)

It remains for a portal such as Intute to bring these diverse internet sources together and present them as a coherent body of research resources on particular topics. In its Humanities, Architecture and Planning, and Geography and the Environment divisions, Intute has several sites reviewed which support this topic, including:

• Britain in pictures
• Centre for Urban History, University of Leicester
• CUBE : Centre for the Understanding of the Built Environment
• Flickr : photo sharing
• Flickr Friends of The Twentieth Century Society
• Ideal homes : suburbia in focus
• Leodis database
• The architectural league : NY
• Urban conservation glossary
• Urban Morphology
• Urban Morphology Research at the University of Birmingham
• Urbanicity

Image credits:

• Staffordshire Hoard: Cheek piece, fittings and zoomorphic mount by portableantiquities, licensed under Creative Commons
• A group of Dalmatians and their owners before the judges, 1920s or 30s by Sam Hood, no known copyright restrictions, from Flickr: The Commons
• Singapore- no camera by daniellih licensed under Creative Commons
• V&A Museum, Cast courts by VeronikaB, licensed under Creative Commons
• Mark Dion, collection of specimens by libbyrosof, licensed under Creative Commons
• guerrilla girls in chelsea by jeannejo licensed under Creative Commons
• Leeds Historical Expedition Society banner © phill.d urbEX photography, reproduced by kind permission of phill.d.
• Gledhow Grove (Chapel Allerton), by kind permission of Leeds Library and Information Services, www.leodis.net.
• Grandeur, from a photo on Flickr by phill.d, licensed under Creative Commons.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 15th, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under Advent calendar 2009, Architecture and planning, History, Museum, library and archive studies, Visual arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.