Who Gets to Document my Culture?

 

Who Gets to Document my Culture?

 I have been documenting African American culture, events, etc. since I started being a volunteer for Wikipedia in 2015. I saw taking photos and adding content to Wikicommons and Wikidata as a way especially to document African American and African Diaspora culture and events. 

Not just cameras for photography, but cameras for filming, recording, observing and preserving.

I have photographed communities and cultural events. I have also made films. The more I do this work, the more I think about what it means to document a community from within.

And that leads me to a question:

Who gets to document African American culture?

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

I mean something deeper:

Who has the opportunity to decide what is important enough to photograph, film, 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 organized 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 working behind the scenes who may never appear on the official program.

We know the history behind the building.

We know why the event matters.

An outside photographer or filmmaker may come and create beautiful documentation.

But someone from within the community may see something completely different.

They may recognize the relationships.

They may know who needs to be interviewed.

They may understand why a particular song was chosen.

They may know that the person sitting quietly in the audience has been part of the community for fifty years.

That knowledge changes what gets documented.

A Photograph Is One Moment. A Film Can Tell a Story.

Photography has enormous power.

One photograph can preserve a face, a place or a moment.

But filmmaking gives us another dimension.

A film can capture a person's voice.

It can preserve an accent.

It can record laughter.

It can capture music.

It can show how people move through a space.

It can record the sounds of an event.

It can allow someone to explain their own history in their own words.

A photograph might show an elder sitting at a community celebration.

A film might allow that elder to tell us why the celebration began, who started it, and what it meant to the neighborhood.

Those are different forms of knowledge.

And both are important.

The Community Becomes the Archive

This is why I have become interested in documentation as more than taking pictures.

When I photograph or film something, I begin wondering what else I should learn.

Who is that person?

What is their story?

Who taught them?

How long has this event existed?

Who created it?

What happened before this gathering?

What will happen afterward?

What does the community itself think is important?

The camera becomes a doorway into research.

A photograph can lead to an interview.

An interview can lead to an article.

An article can lead to a Wikipedia entry.

A film can preserve voices that might otherwise disappear.

Photographs can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons when they are appropriately licensed.

Information can be added to Wikipedia and Wikidata.

Suddenly one event has created several forms of public knowledge.

Wikipedia Is Not Just About Famous People

This matters because when I work with Wikipedia, I see how much history is missing.

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

But communities are built by many people who will never become household names.

Teachers.

Artists.

Farmers.

Organizers.

Musicians.

Business owners.

Community elders.

Religious leaders.

Young people beginning their careers.

People who keep cultural traditions alive.

Sometimes there is no photograph of them.

Sometimes there is no film.

Sometimes there isn't even an article explaining what they did.

And then a person dies.

A building disappears.

An organization closes.

An annual event ends.

And we realize that something important has not been preserved.

The Importance of Community-Controlled Documentation

This is where the question of funding becomes important.

I don't think the most important question is simply:

Who received the money?

The bigger question is:

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

And there is another question:

Who will have the resources to photograph and film African American cultural life during that period?

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

This is important to me.

I am not saying that African Americans should be the only people photographing or filming African American culture.

That would make no sense.

People from outside a community can create beautiful, respectful and historically valuable work.

Collaboration is important.

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

There is something powerful about being able to say:

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 and hear this.

That is not exclusion.

That is participation.

Who Decides What Is Valuable?

Every act of documentation involves choices.

Who gets photographed?

Who gets filmed?

Who gets interviewed?

What questions are asked?

What is considered important?

What is left out?

An outside observer might focus on the celebrity.

A community member might focus on the person who built the institution that made the celebrity's appearance possible.

A filmmaker might arrive looking for the main event.

Someone who knows the community might notice a conversation happening in the hallway that explains the entire history of the event.

What we see as valuable is influenced by what we know.

That is why community knowledge matters.

The Camera Is a Knowledge Tool

I have come to think of cameras differently.

A camera is not simply a piece of equipment.

It can be a research tool.

A historical tool.

An educational tool.

A storytelling tool.

A camera can preserve something that written records don't capture.

A photograph can preserve someone's face.

A film can preserve someone's voice.

A photograph can show us a place.

A film can show us how that place sounded and felt.

A photograph can document an event.

A film can allow someone who was there to tell us what the event meant.

Together, photography and film can create a much richer record.

And Then There Is Artificial Intelligence

This question becomes even more important in the age of artificial intelligence.

AI systems increasingly draw upon information available on the internet.

Wikipedia is part of that information ecosystem.

Wikimedia Commons is part of it too.

So I wonder:

What will artificial intelligence know about African American communities if we don't document ourselves?

If the photograph doesn't exist, the image may never become part of the digital record.

If the interview was never recorded, the person's voice may disappear.

If the event wasn't documented, future researchers may not even know it happened.

If the story isn't written down, an AI system may have nothing reliable to find.

That concerns me.

Because absence can become part of the record.

Documentation Is Knowledge Infrastructure

This is why I don't see my own photography and filmmaking as separate from my work with Wikipedia.

They are connected.

I can go somewhere and observe.

I can photograph.

I can film.

I can talk with people.

I can research.

I can write.

I can create educational material.

And where appropriate, I can contribute information and freely licensed media to Wikimedia projects.

Each piece strengthens another piece.

That is what I mean when I think about knowledge infrastructure.

The photograph isn't the final product.

The film isn't necessarily the final product.

The real question is:

What knowledge can we build from what we have documented?

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 transportation?

Who gets access to the events?

Who gets the opportunity to interview people?

Who gets to make films?

Who gets to upload photographs?

Who gets to preserve the recordings?

Who gets to research the people in them?

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 tell these stories, but because we know things about our communities that may not be visible to someone looking from the outside.

We Are Not Just Subjects

This may be the most important point for me.

African Americans should not exist only as subjects of documentation.

We can be the photographers.

We can be the filmmakers.

We can be the interviewers.

We can be the researchers.

We can be the archivists.

We can be the Wikipedians.

We can be the people deciding which stories need to be preserved.

And we can invite others to participate with us.

That is a different relationship to history.

It changes us from people being documented into people participating in the creation of knowledge about ourselves.

Who Owns the Story?

Maybe the real question isn't:

Who owns the camera?

Maybe it is:

Who gets to help create the story?

I don't think the answer has to be ownership.

It can be stewardship.

It can be collaboration.

It can be shared knowledge.

That is one of the things I appreciate about the idea behind Wikimedia: knowledge can become available to everyone.

But communities need an opportunity to put their knowledge into that 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 camera.

Give them the microphone.

Give them the opportunity to photograph, film, interview, research and preserve.

Then let them show the world what they know.**

That is not simply documentation.

That is community knowledge becoming part of human knowledge.