After the New York Public Library opened its Digital Gallery, I lost hours—maybe days—of my life to browsing. The news that the Smithsonian Institution has launched the Smithsonian Photography Initiative is very welcome indeed (even if it means I'm looking forward to some late nights in front of the laptop).
As Jacqueline Trescott notes in her Washington Post article, SPI is a virtual meta-institution, developed in lieu of a photography museum:
For about 30 years, the idea of a physical institution, a Center for Photography, was debated. But that faded as fundraising became an uphill battle and the Internet provided new possibilities. "In the early part of the 21st century, this seemed like a lot of work, to create a building. We decided to embrace fully the idea of the virtual world," [SPI director Merry] Foresta says. Museums were beginning to digitize their collections, and many curators and scientists were very protective of their materials.
"Quickly we realized we would have a war on our hands if we were loading up the trucks and saying, 'Bring your photographs.' It would have destroyed what is unique about the Smithsonian," Foresta says.
The simple truth about photography is that, as a relatively late-breaking art medium, it's always been subject to pre-existing categories. Photography is a plastic art and belongs in art museums; photographs are historical documents that belong in historical institutions. Often a single photograph has myriad uses. The advantage, then, of a digital meta-collection is not merely that it skirts the inevitable turf battles, but that it allows users to organize the same body of photographic work from many perspectives.
New media technology also allows for interactivity that would have been impossible even a few years ago. If you visit sites like Flickr and Del.icio.us, you're already familiar with applications for sharing images and ideas about them. SPI features a bookmarking function called "Enter the Frame" where users can view groups of images associated with other users' keyword searches. For example, one search string this morning reads "snakes, self-portrait, 1884, standing, man, circle, women, 1880s, 1890s, glass." Clicking on "self-portrait" brings up a pair of photographs by Nikki S. Lee, including Hispanic Project No. 2. You can drag and drop the image into a bookmark dock called "My Sequences," which allows you to record your visit and then lets others see what you've found.
One simple aspect of the site that's useful: the exhibitions calendar shows all the photographic exhibitions (real and online) on view across the Smithsonian Institution.
