On Saturday 27 April 2013 a new project was started on Luminous-Lint to consolidate the content collected over the last ten years. Building the website has been complex and it is the only online freely available resource that brings together photographs, ephemera and related materials on the History of Photography based on thousands of public and private collections. If there is another one let me know!
Lots of you have helped in all sorts of ways (thanks) but essentially Luminous-Lint is only me!
The evolution of Luminous-Lint has taken time to mature and there are now 50,428 images on the website. These are organised into hundreds of online exhibitions and many thousands of visual indexes that connect images to others in obvious and not so obvious ways. This wealth of content is supported by increasingly thorough reading lists.
I’m now ready for the next step.
If you haven’t been to Luminous-Lint in a while it now has 1,108 Themes which is pretty amazing.With this structure the next step is to bring together the photographs, original sources and texts for each theme.
The themes will have visual examples traced back to individual collectors or institutions along with the texts and footnotes that link them together. Gradually each theme will become an ever-improving history and we will have many hundreds of them making a rich visual resource for all of us.
Take a look at a few pages to get a sense of what is already available – how about Art, Daguerreotypes, Camera Work or USSR in Construction as examples. These are only the starting points and there are vast amounts of supporting material.
So how do we support this endeavour?
Kickstarter is a website for making pledges to creative projects. The $50,000 Kickstarter Project I announced is to work on the Themes in order to bring these histories together – it won’t be perfect but it will provide a framework for us to add to as time goes on.
Here is the KIckstarter project - and you can see a video of me explaining the next step (scary thought). To date this fundraising effort has raised $3,521 in about four days which is gratefully received. Fund raising is all or nothing and it ends on 27 May 2013.
We tend to accept free resources and assume they will always be around but they require nurturing to survive. As a community passionate about Photohistory we will need to find institutions or philanthropists who are prepared to support large scale projects on the History of Photography and place them on a secure footing.
Many of you have provided content, advice, texts and scans for which I’m grateful. In the background I’ve financed it over the last ten years and done the heavy lifting. I’d be grateful if those of you with connections and influence discuss the best means of supporting Luminous-Lint. There is a vast amount of content and knowledge that is available nowhere else.
I’m prepared, with your support, to do the work to make Luminous-Lint all that it can be to assist the community. I’d be grateful if you would show you support by Making a Pledge and by starting a dialogue on how Luminous-Lint can be supported long term.
All the best and thanks for all your help over the years,
Alan Griffiths - alan@luminous-lint.com
Comments