In barely 100 years, photography has gone from a magical, even mystical process, to an afterthought. Nothing better captures how much of an afterthought photography is today than the banal miracle that is Flickr, the photo-sharing site owned by Yahoo, which has more than three billion photographs online. Billion.
“Flickr is to photography what the Pacific Ocean is to water, what Times Square is to humanity,” the cultural critic Luc Sante wrote in an essay for the January-February 2008 issue of Photograph magazine.
“Flickr is a great leveler, sweeping away distinctions between amateurism and expertise, art and record-keeping.”
Against this backdrop, there are the relics from the earlier age of photography — historical photographs that have been preserved in national libraries and archives or photo agencies and news media operations. Their relative scarcity alone can make them seem like treasures.
They, too, are finding their way onto the Internet. Compared with the stream of photographs being uploaded (an estimated three million a day on Flickr alone), the historical material can seem a mere trickle. Yet over the past year there have been important new efforts to put these classics online, both to find new audiences for material typically used by researchers and to use those audiences to breathe new meaning into photographs from long ago.
Last month, in what is believed to be the largest donation online of “free” photographs — that is, unrestricted for commercial or noncommercial use — the German national archive uploaded nearly 100,000 historical photographs to the Wikimedia Commons, the virtual archive for material used in Wikipedia articles.
Wikipedia articles include only photographs that have been licensed in the freest way, and there must be a stipulation that the copyright holder either agrees to such terms or that no one holds a copyright.
It is for this reason that articles on Wikipedia about…