Elin Hâf talks to Penny Richards about her use of the National Library’s Flickr Commons collection.
How did you hear about the National Library’s Flickr Commons collection?
I heard about the Flickr Commons uploads from the NLW because I’ve been following the Commons project since it launched! I get a feed for all the latest uploads, so I always know what’s new. I tag through many of the interesting collections, especially if they involve portraits of women, because I do women’s history (I’m a research scholar affiliated with the UCLA Center for the Study of Women).
Why did you choose this photo?
I chose the Cranogwenportrait for a lot of reasons. Her story is very interesting- a 19c. woman with experience as a sea captain, teaching navigation, AND recognized for her excellent poetry at Eisteddfod. The image is good for shoes- nothing complicated- shoes have such a small space for collage elements that the image has to be fairly simple and clear. I like when an image can be flipped horizontally, so the shoes have mirror images on them; that makes more visual sense on shoes than identical images.
Do you intend to use more photos from the collection?
I have used other photos from the NLW collection. For about eight months my daily purse featured an image of Sarah Edith Wynne, the opera singer, wearing a plain taffeta gown. That’s in my Flickr stream too.
Have you had much response to the shoes? Was your friend happy with the shoes?
The shoes aren’t mine-I made them for a friend. She loved them! And when she read the story of Cranogwen, she liked them even more. Her work involves teaching “navigation” in a more abstract sense of the word, so the match was good there. The paint on the shoes cracked a little–it usually does–but the image is still fine and the shoes are very wearable.
What are your thoughts on organisations offering their photographs free of charge online?
I hope that I do justice to the images I find on the Flickr Commons project. It can be tricky: I want to do colourful, energetic, mixed media projects, but I certainly don’t want to make the subjects of the images seem “silly” or mocked. The end products should celebrate women’s history and the work of the women depicted on my shoes and purses, and spur conversations about women’s lives and roles in the past. The institutions involved in the Commons project have generally been very welcoming of my “remixes,” so I think I must be hitting that right note most of the time.