A VIVID Picture for Australia
Associate Professor
Angelina Russo, Swinburne University of Technology, outlines her research
Photo:
Linda McInnes
This Ray Sharpe photo of the Jack Evans
Porpoise Pool, Coolangatta, in 1959 appears in Picture Australia
Courtesy Gold Coast City Library
Flickr photos such as this 1972 family
snap of Brett Matthews at the Jack Evans Porpoise Pool also appear in Picture Australia
Courtesy Brett Matthews
The Library’s Director-General, Jan Fullerton,
presents an award to Flickr photographer Ross Beckley
Photo: Linda McInnes
The VIVID National Photography Festival being held for the first time in Canberra celebrates the vital role of photography in Australian life and history. The festival is an unprecedented opportunity to appreciate the richness of this enduring medium.
Picture Australia, the online portal to over 1.5 million images of Australiana, is a key resource in accessing this visual heritage. For Picture Australia the festival has provided the creative licence to experiment with new ways to engage audiences.
Building on the service’s now renowned use of Flickr, the photo sharing website, events planned in association with the festival have brought online audiences together with representatives from their cultural institutions for the first time. A public event, a video launch and the creation of a third Picture Australia Flickr group have all aimed to provoke debate about improving access to Australian collections using social media.
Hosted by the National Library of Australia, Picture Australia was created to provide a single access point to the rich pictorial collections of memory institutions like galleries, archives, libraries and museums. Until the Library’s Flickr project began in 2006, it was mostly a historical resource. Since then an open invitation has stood for everyone to contribute their images to Picture Australia via three groups in Flickr. These images are then transferred into Picture Australia on a weekly basis. Over 1700 group members have added over 30 000 images to the Australian story. Picture Australia’s page views have increased by 43 per cent since the project began.
Launching the Picture Australia Video
A public event titled ‘Celebrating History and Invention’, held on 14 July, attracted over 120 people. The evening’s proceedings began with the launch of the Picture Australia video by Jan Fullerton, Director-General, National Library of Australia. The video includes interviews with researchers, Flickr photographers and picture curators about the uses and value of Picture Australia for them.
A highlight is the interview with Catherine Martin, Costume Designer and Co-Producer, Bazmark Productions, discussing the importance of Picture Australia in her research for the production design of the yet-to-be released film Australia. Generously assisted by Bazmark, the interview juxtaposes stills from Picture Australia with the film and illustrates the application of Catherine’s research on the film’s production design.
Both the video and the full credit list of the many hundreds of images it contains are available on Picture Australia (at www.pictureaustralia.org/about/PictureAustraliaVideo.html) and on YouTube. Since the premiere, over 1300 people have viewed the video on YouTube.
Other Presentations at the Event
Following the screening were two informative presentations. Associate Professor Angelina Russo from Swinburne University of Technology provided convincing research into the benefits of using social media by cultural institutions to increase audience access. Angelina noted that few cultural agencies have yet implemented their own social media projects.
The next speaker, Helen Morgan, Flickr member and Research Fellow in the area of cultural informatics at the University of Melbourne’s eScholarship Research Centre, encouraged Picture Australia’s Flickr photographers to improve the quality of their tagging or keywords used to describe their images.
Helen demonstrated how tags are critical for the search and retrieval of images in Picture Australia. Using the search example of ‘Jack Evans Porpoise Pool’ , Helen showed how this search retrieves official photographs from the Gold Coast City Council Library Service, the National Library, the National Archives of Australia and the State Library of Queensland.
But this search term also retrieves family photographs loaded by Flickr members who share childhood memories of the Jack Evans Porpoise Pool. These images demonstrate how narratives can cross-reference one another and multiply.
The juxtaposition of these ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ histories is very significant. It has also underpinned the conception of the ‘Re-Picture Australia’ Flickr group. In this group Flickr members are invited to ‘mash-up’ public domain historical images provided by Picture Australia’s participants into new artworks.
What significance does all this possibly have for serious research, you might ask?
The ‘Re-Picture Australia’ Flickr group provides the opportunity to carefully observe how photographers in the past have composed their images to create meaning. The new artistic products produced by these Flickr members then become a useful source for other researchers to understand how ‘Re-Picture Australia’ contributors perceive history and are prepared to make and remake it.
But perhaps the question is best answered in the negative, as without these alternative histories we may well miss the central construction of both narrative and history that is the blurring of fact with fiction and the randomness of events. Alternative or anti-histories challenge the dominance of official histories and move us as individuals from spectators to active participants.
In concluding the evening’s events, Jan Fullerton also presented awards and prizes for outstanding contributors by Flickr photographers to Ross Beckley and Veronique Mosley Larbordus from R&V Photographers. The awards acknowledge the high quality of their work and the support they have provided to Picture Australia’s online community. The prizes of designed books of their images were generously provided by Life Design.
The VIVID National Photography Festival has challenged Picture Australia to break new ground. It has brought public institutions and new audiences together to ponder a shared visual history and its collective online future. The task ahead for Picture Australia is to find more opportunities to continue to expand this exchange of ideas.
The Library's overall contribution to Vivid—including exhibitions, floortalks, projection events and suport for the management of the festival—will be described in a future issue of Gateways.
Fiona Hooton
Manager, Picture Australia



