About click!
At this transitional moment—as digital technology is altering the form, content, and transmission of camera imagery—click! photography changes everything provides a unique opportunity to reflect on the history, spread, practice, and power of photography.
Organized by the Smithsonian Photography Initiative (SPI) as a series of integrated programs, click! photography changes everything invites the public to consider ways in which photography enables us to see, experience, and interact with the world.
click! invites experts from a spectrum of professional worlds—innovators, image makers, writers, and public figures—to survey the ways photography has influenced the history, progress, and practice of each of their fields of interest. These commentaries and their related images reveal how photographs are encoded with information and values, and how the meaning of images depends on the needs and perspectives we bring to them.
Eventually, over one hundred project contributors will explore the ways photography has impacted and continues to change everything—from anthropology to astrophysics, media to medicine, philosophy to sports, war to love. The goal of click! is to argue for a broader, more inclusive social and cultural history of photography, and a deeper understanding of the role photographs play as active agents of change.
Beginning in Fall 2008, SPI also invites site visitors to submit their own photos and commentaries to the six click! themes:
Who We Are
Photography is central to understanding who we are and how we portray ourselves and those around us. Here you’ll find stories about portraits and other pictures that create or shape identities, define our civil rights, or declare our patriotism.
What We Do
Photography does more than document what we’ve done; it shapes what we do. Images and commentaries consider photography’s active relationship to architecture, the arts, business, communication, crime, education, work, and entertainment.
What We See
Photography allows us to see what the human eye cannot, what lies outside our daily experience, and determines what we choose to show to each other. Images and commentaries explore subjects that include changing photographic technologies, journalism, censorship, perception, surveillance, time, and motion.
Where We Go
Photography enables us to see beyond the boundaries of everyday life in ways that were once unimaginable. Images and commentaries address subjects such as aerospace, exploration, geology, medical imaging, military planning, mining, oceanography, tourism, travel, transportation, and virtual reality.
What We Want
Photography powerfully shapes our needs and expresses desire. Images and commentaries examine photography’s role in advertising, beauty, celebrity, consumer culture, entertainment, evidence, fashion, food, imagination, privacy, public relations, real estate, sex, spectacle, style, and truth.
What We Remember
Photography influences and alters our relationship to history, memory, and even death. Images and commentaries investigate how photographic images impact commemoration, history, truth, and the future.
Future click! programming will expand to include new online programs, on-the-ground exhibition and image events, publications, and educational guides for use of click! programs in the classroom.
Please contact SPI if you would like more information about click!.
