This is a modest website for a project called UnCommons : The Women of Wikipedia.
For many years, I’ve been collecting images of females and female-identifying women from WikiCommons.org, an arm of Wikpedia.org that serves up “freely usable” (i.e., public domain) images of absolutely everything.
I’ve been fascinated by the images of women I’ve found on WikiCommons. Around every corner, in every category — expected and unexpected, revelatory, vulgar, and everything in between — there are images of great beauty, wretchedness, numbness, surprise, and so much more. In every picture is life itself. There are amateur photographs, professional portraits, artworks, and widely distributed images of individuals or groups that many of us (but not all) will instantly recognize.
Something about the images of women and girls I find on WikiCommons feels wrong: Do these women know they are in the public domain? What does that even mean? If they are aware they’re a .jpeg in the Wikipedia multiverse, did they consent? Were they compensated? At what point do their pictures become copyright-free? Who can use these images and in what applications? In print? Online? On billboards? In private? In this way, I feel a mixture of unease and pride as a cis female, as an observer, as a protector, as an amateur historian and as a curious human every time I happen upon an image in the Wiki system that takes my breath away. I have found thousands of these, and I’ve only just begun. I intend to share these public domain images of women with the world in a context that hopefully infuses, replaces, or creates pride in the glory of femaleness.
There’s much more to say about this project — my project and the ongoing project of WikiCommons — but as this is a work in progress, I’ll leave you with the images and Instagram page (@womenofwiki) and a few quotes from Susan Sontag in her 1977 work, On Photography:
“Like a car, a camera is sold as a predatory weapon — one that’s as automated as possible, ready to spring. Popular taste expects an easy, an invisible technology. Manufacturers reassure their customers that taking pictures demands no skill or expert knowledge, that the machine is all-knowing, and responds to the slightest pressure of the will. It’s as simple as turning the ignition key or pulling the trigger. Like guns and cars, cameras are fantasy-machines whose use is addictive.”
“A capitalist society requires a culture based on images. It needs to furnish vast amounts of entertainment in order to stimulate buying and anesthetize the injuries of class, race, and sex. And it needs to gather unlimited amounts of information, the better to exploit natural resources, increase productivity, keep order, make war, give jobs to bureaucrats. The camera’s twin capacities, to subjectivise reality and to objectify it, ideally serve these needs as strengthen them. Cameras define reality in the two ways essential to the workings of an advanced industrial society: as a spectacle (for masses) and as an object of surveillance (for rulers). The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself. The narrowing of free political choice to free economic consumption requires the unlimited production and consumption of images.”
“To collect photographs is to collect the world.”
— Susan Sontag, On Photography (1977)