Studio portrait of a seated man with a moustache in a sweater, vest, and suit coat. Image created by Charles J. Van Schaick and part of the images in Michael Lesy's 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip.

One of the aspects I find more interesting about photography is its place in history. The role that it plays to communicate -and in some cases to influence- events of ordinary life, moments that define who we are and what we do in this world. I believe that the relevance of photography remains a critical defining factor of history today -even when we are saturated of visual information-, but it is certain that photography is the most valuable visual record we have from our past century.

Until recently, most of the historical collections of photography have been out of our reach or have been difficult to access. But the times are changing and this is very significant. The impact of photography is at large dependent on the distribution, and this is even more important for photography with historical value.

It is therefore great news that several historical societies are starting to distribute their photographic collections using Web 2.0 technologies. We learned about the Library of Congress (U.S.A.) uploading collections of their images into Flickr, I referred yesterday to the website Shorpy, and I like here to introduce the activities that the Wisconsin Historical Society is taking to distribute their images using a range of web 2.0 technologies.

Driven at large by the effort of Andy Adams, the creator and editor of the great site Flak Photo, this historical society is now using e-mail, Flickr, eBay and RSS feeds, to distribute their collection. In addition, Andy is planning to go even further and develop a site that will allow for a nice visual experience of these historical images, a reflection of what he learned developing Flak Photo. I expect great things from his work.

I like to highlight one of the series of images that they have uploaded into Flikr. These are the pictures from Michael Lesy's 1973 book Wisconsin Death Trip (a precious book and a movie), which features photographs from the Charles Van Schaick collection, the entirely of which is housed at the WHS Archives.

I think this is very significant and I have to applaud the effort that people like Andy Adams are doing to not only distribute contemporary photography but also historical images that define our history.

Here below Andy shares with us more details on the effort he is leading at the Wisconsin Historical Society.

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