Who Gets to Document the Culture?

 

Who Gets to Document the Culture?

 I have been thinking about cameras.

Not cameras as expensive pieces of equipment. Not cameras as a way to produce beautiful photographs.

I have been thinking about the camera as a historical tool.

And that led me to a question:

Who gets to document African American culture?

I don't mean who is allowed to take a photograph.

Anyone can take a photograph.

I mean something deeper:

Who has the opportunity to decide what is important enough to photograph, preserve, research and eventually place into the public record?

We Know Our Communities

I believe African Americans should have the opportunity to document their own cultural events.

Why?

Because we know our communities.

We know the people who have been doing the work for years.

We know the grandmother who has been organizing the annual celebration.

We know the neighborhood institution that has quietly held a community together.

We know the musician who hasn't become famous yet.

We know the teacher who influenced generations of children.

We know the person standing in the corner who may not be on the program but without whom the event might never have happened.

An outside photographer might take a wonderful photograph of the person on stage.

A community photographer might turn around and photograph the person who made the stage possible.

Both photographs have value.

But they tell different stories.

What Do We Consider Important?

This is where documentation becomes more than photography.

Every photographer makes choices.

Who gets photographed?

Who doesn't?

What is in the frame?

What is outside the frame?

What moment is considered significant?

And who makes those decisions?

When people from within a community are given the opportunity to document their own lives, they bring something that cannot simply be purchased with a camera:

knowledge of the community.

They know what is ordinary today but may be historically important tomorrow.

That matters enormously to me as a Wikipedian.

Wikipedia Is Not Just About Famous People

When I first became involved with Wikipedia, I began to understand how much of history is missing.

We tend to think about Wikipedia articles as being about famous people.

But history isn't made only by famous people.

It is also made by teachers, organizers, artists, farmers, community leaders, neighborhood businesses, churches, cultural institutions and ordinary people who create extraordinary communities.

Sometimes there is no photograph of them.

Sometimes there is no article.

Sometimes there isn't even a good source describing what they did.

And then someone dies, a building disappears, an organization closes, or an event stops happening.

Suddenly we realize that we didn't preserve the story.

The Camera Can Be the Beginning

This is why I don't see photography as separate from Wikipedia.

A photograph can be the beginning of research.

You photograph someone.

Then you ask:

Who is this person?

What have they done?

Who influenced them?

What organization are they connected to?

Where did this event come from?

How long has it existed?

Who founded it?

What happened before this photograph was taken?

What happened afterward?

That can lead to an interview.

An article.

A Wikipedia entry.

A Wikimedia Commons collection.

A Wikidata record.

A documentary.

An educational project.

One photograph can open a door into an entire history.

And Then There Is Funding

What happens to community-controlled documentation when the organization that was helping support it loses its funding?

I Am Not Saying Someone Else Can't Tell Our Story

This is important.

I am not arguing that African Americans should be the only people photographing African American culture.

That would make no sense.

People from outside a community can create beautiful, important and respectful documentation.

Collaboration is valuable.

But there is something different about having the capacity to document yourself.

There is something powerful about a community saying:

We want to preserve this.

We know why this matters.

We know these people.

We understand this history.

We want our children and grandchildren to see it.

That is not exclusion.

That is participation.

Who Decides What Survives?

This question becomes even more important now because we are living through a massive transformation in how knowledge is created and distributed.

Wikipedia is one part of that transformation.

Wikimedia Commons is another.

And now artificial intelligence systems are drawing upon information available on the internet to answer questions about the world.

So I find myself wondering:

If African American communities don't have the resources to document themselves, who will fill the gap?

And perhaps an even bigger question:

What will artificial intelligence know about us if we don't put our own knowledge into the public record?

That question concerns me.

Because absence is also information.

If the photograph doesn't exist, the AI may not know the person existed.

If the article doesn't exist, the story may not be found.

If the history isn't documented, someone else may eventually tell it—or it may disappear altogether.

This Is Why Community Photography Matters

I have come to see the photographer differently.

A photographer can be a historian.

A photographer can be an archivist.

A photographer can be a researcher.

A photographer can be a storyteller.

A photographer can be a bridge between a community and the larger world.

And when that photographer understands the community, the work becomes even more meaningful.

The question isn't simply:

How many photographs did we take?

The question is:

What knowledge did those photographs preserve?

Who Gets the Camera?

So I keep returning to the question:

Who gets the camera?

Who gets the equipment?

Who gets the training?

Who gets the travel support?

Who gets access to the events?

Who gets the opportunity to upload the photographs?

Who gets to identify the people in them?

Who gets to research their stories?

Who gets to decide what is important?

And ultimately:

Who gets to help create the historical record?

I think African Americans should have the resources to document their own communities.

Not because other people cannot do it.

Because we know things about our communities that may not be visible to someone looking from the outside.

And I think that knowledge deserves a place in the world's free-knowledge record.

Maybe the Real Question Is Bigger

Perhaps the real question isn't:

Who owns the camera?

Maybe it is:

Who owns the story?

And perhaps the answer doesn't have to be ownership at all.

Maybe it can be participation.

Maybe it can be stewardship.

Maybe it can be shared knowledge.

That is one of the things I appreciate about the idea behind Wikimedia.

The goal is not supposed to be that one person owns the knowledge.

The goal is that knowledge becomes available to everyone.

But for that to work, communities have to have the opportunity to put their knowledge into the system in the first place.

So I keep wondering.

If we want a truly global record of human knowledge, shouldn't the people whose history is being documented have the opportunity to help create that record?

I think so.

**Give people the tools.

Give them the opportunity.

Then let them show us what they know.**

That may be one of the most important forms of free knowledge we can create.