George Eastman House :: The Museum :: Recent Announcements; well from July
Eastman House joins The Commons at Flickr; site users say images are ‘fascinating’ and ‘inspiring’
Monday, July 28, 2008 --
Project also features photographs from collections of Smithsonian and Library of Congress; goal is to share images and informationGeorge Eastman House International Museum of Photography & Film has been invited by popular photo-sharing Web site Flickr to join The Commons project. A selection of photographs from the collections of Eastman House, the world’s oldest museum of photography, went live on July 17 and are now being shared with the world. Eastman House is one of six institutions taking part, as its images are shared alongside the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian, Brooklyn Museum, Australia’s Powerhouse Museum, and France’s Bibliothéque Toulouse.
Flickr, a Yahoo company, describes The Commons as “Your opportunity to contribute to describing the world’s public photo collections.” Flickr is inviting its users to browse, tag, and share comments about the images. In the Web world, a tag is defined as an informally assigned keyword or term that aids in browsing and searching.
Eastman House’s initial posting from its collection of 400,000 images features autochromes, daguerreotypes, and images from the turn of the 20th century made from glass-plate negatives. Additional photographs will continually be added. By summer’s end, Eastman House will post works by celebrated photographer Lewis Hine, whose famous images document immigration at Ellis Island, child labor, and the building of the Empire State Building.
Does the connection of several important museums and archives with flickr; suggests that it is a site that is growing in importance? Has the role of photography in a cultural sense changed?
