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Re-Picturing Australia through the Looking Glass

An invitation to Re-Picture Australia

Picture Australia is calling all image makers to creatively reuse, reinterpret and ‘Re-Picture’ Australia’s national collections!

New Creativity

We are encouraging all artists and designers to ‘mash-up’ significant public-domain images into new artworks by combining and editing the historical images and incorporating your own illustrations and photographs to create innovative montages. Ultimately, we want you to take hold of Australia’s pictorial history and lead us ‘through the looking glass’ to a world re-invented.

In 2006 the National Library of Australia embarked on a flagship partnership with Yahoo!’s Flickr (www.flickr.com/) that allows members of the public to submit their personal photographic archives to Picture Australia, thereby enriching our national image collection. The project has been immensely successful, with more than 23 000 digital photographs submitted to Picture Australia by mid-2007. The enormous popularity of this project has confirmed that people want to contribute and provide additional value to Australia’s collections, thereby offering a new level of interpretation to Australian history. With this in mind we have developed our latest opportunity, which will allow artists to utilise the collections in a new way and contribute their work through the ‘Re-Picture Australia’ Flickr group.

Mash-ups

From December 2007 high-resolution public-domain images, donated by a selection of our participants, will be publicly available to download from Picture Australia. Artists will have unlimited access to mash-up these images and can include them in as many artworks as they like, bringing fresh significance to the historical collection material available in Picture Australia.

Once completed, these works will be loaded into Picture Australia via the Re-Picture Australia Flickr group, with the new mash-ups being made available in Picture Australia each week. To increase the research value of these artworks, they need to be accurately described, including a title and citations within the description or tags fields for the public domain images used in the artwork. Picture Australia also asks contributors to follow the Flickr community guidelines.

Licensing Advice

While it is not a condition of participation in the Re-Picture Australia initiative, we strongly suggest image makers license their artworks using a Creative Commons licence. These licences offer a flexible alternative to the standard ‘all rights reserved’ copyright licence and will allow Picture Australia to promote the project through non-commercial media. They also ensure that artists retain control of their work and are attributed as the creators. Creative Commons licences will also enable us to incorporate selected pieces in Picture Australia’s 2008 Vivid National Photography Festival activities, which will include a multimedia display in the National Library.

Why not create a modern story using this historic imagery and give it new meaning and research potential? To be involved, check www.pictureaustralia.org or email us at pictaust@nla.gov.au for more information.

Lucy Carson
Picture Australia Administrator, Collaborative Services