2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation Project

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About 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Documentation Project

Share your images of the 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival! Throughout the Festival (June 25-June 29 and July 2-6, 2008), a selection of the images posted to the SFF2008 Flickr group will be highlighted on the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's (SPI’s) website, photography.si.edu/participate.aspx, alongside images by Smithsonian photographers, interns, and volunteers.

Please follow the Flickr Community Guidelines. Play nice, do upload content that you have created, and respect the copyright of others. Also, please do not post photographs of children other than your own unless you have permission from their parent or guardian to do so. SPI will use the photos posted to the SFF2008 group solely for educational purposes on their websites. We will credit you if the information is provided with your photo.

The 2008 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Photo Sharing Project strives to strengthen both the mission of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to promote cultural democracy, visitor participation, and cross-cultural conversation and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's mission to document how photography plays an integral role in our lives and throughout the Smithsonian.

About the Smithsonian Folklife Festival

The Smithsonian Folklife Festival is an international exposition of living cultural heritage annually produced outdoors on the National Mall of the United States in Washington, D.C., by the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The Festival takes place for ten days every summer overlapping the Fourth of July holiday. It is an educational presentation that features community-based cultural exemplars. Free to the public, like other Smithsonian museums, each Festival typically draws more than one million visitors.

This year, the 42nd Annual Smithsonian Folklife Festival runs from June 25-June 29 on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and features the following: Bhutan: Land of the Thunder Dragon, NASA: Fifty Years and Beyond, and Texas: A Celebration of Music, Food, and Wine .

www.folklife.si.edu/festival/2008/index.html

About the Smithsonian Photography Initiative

Established in 2001, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative is web-based and dedicated to a program of interactive exhibitions, publications and educational activities via its website, www.photography.si.edu. SPI exists to broaden public understanding and appreciation of photography at the Smithsonian; enhance the Smithsonian’s public programming and educational outreach efforts in photography; and use innovative technologies to create new opportunities for research and scholarship about the cultural impact of photographs.

Photography and the Smithsonian were born within a decade of each other in the mid-19th century. The Smithsonian was quick to adopt the camera to advance its mission, cataloging plant and animal species and documenting the grandeur of the American landscape as well as its original inhabitants. Cameras accompanied each Smithsonian expedition and the images brought back from all over the world carried information about people and places that most Americans would never otherwise experience. Many of the photographs now in the Smithsonian's vast collections of photography were taken not by professional photographers but by the expedition participants- explorers, scientists, geologists, biologists, engineers, etc.-whose point of view was as individual as the nature of their task.

http://photography.si.edu/participate.aspx