Today, Explore is populated with a curated selection of photos celebrating Black culture, history, and photographers.
In this Explore takeover, we’re featuring archival content from institutions like the Library of Congress, the State Library and Archives of Florida, the U.S. National Archives, and more. We’re also proud to feature the work of a group of Black photographers that help make Flickr the community that it is. We curated this selection with the work of Flickr members that shouted out their work here and that responded to our call for photographers that are documenting the Black Lives Matter movement and Black culture last summer.
We hope that you’ll take the time to look through these photos and acknowledge the history, stories, and people behind them and give the photographers and institutions featured in this takeover a fave, a follow, and comments of appreciation for their work.
And if you’d like to read more about how some photographers approach documenting Black culture and the Black Lives Matter movement, we’d recommend the following stories and interviews featuring members of the Flickr community:
- Jay Ford shares his photography story in “My Camera, My Voice”
- Flickr member Elvert Barnes shares how he has documented three decades of social movements
- Photographers that are documenting the Black Lives Matter movement
This Explore takeover features photography from the following institutions that serve as great resources not only during Black History Month, but throughout the entire year.
- WOCinTech Chat has shared three albums of Creative Commons licensed photos with the goal of increasing visible representation of women of color in tech.
- The Library of Congress recently shared an album of widely requested photos of Black activists, all free of copyright restrictions.
- The Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America interviewed 72 African-American women about their lives and work between 1976 and 1981. Portraits of these women are shared on Flickr.
- John H. White is a photojournalist and recipient of the 1982 Pulitzer Prize. His work for the Documerica Project, shared on Flickr by the U.S. National Archives, captured the spirit of the African-American community in Chicago, Illinois in the early 70’s.
- NASA on the Commons has an album of photos that shares the stories of Black astronauts and their contributions to space exploration.
Again, this list covers just a few of the institutions and individuals that are featured in this Explore takeover and we want to acknowledge that the work of Black photographers, artists, and documenting Black history and culture continues every single day. Thank you for taking the time to appreciate these photos and the members of our community that share.
About Explore Takeovers
Explore takeovers are manually curated by the Flickr team to celebrate specific communities and themes on Flickr. In the past, we’ve done Explore takeovers to highlight photography of the Black Lives Matter movement, Polaroid Week, and Inktober. Moving forward, we aim to curate an Explore takeover on the fourth Thursday of each month. If there’s a specific theme that you’d like to see highlighted in an Explore takeover, leave us a FlickrMail here. And if you’d like to learn more about how Explore normally works, check out our recently published Explore report.