A community project to document more than 1800 glass-plate negatives taken in Greece during the 1890s and early 1900s.
In July 2017 we launched a new crowd sourcing project to help us identify and catalogue the Woodhouse Photographic Archive. Using Flickr, contributors have been asked to leave comments detailing where the image may have been taken, a description of the image and tags to connect the archive with the places and people pictured. By 2025 we have received over 900 comments and tags that have helped identify and document these amazing images.
Head over to our Flickr site to add your own contributions to the Woodhouse photographic collection.
The Nicholson Collection holds more than 1800 glass-plate negatives taken by former curator William J Woodhouse primarily in Greece between 1890 and 1935. A small portion of the archive also includes photographs of his family in the Blue Mountains and Sydney region, NSW, Australia. They were donated to the Nicholson Museum in 1984 by Liska Woodhouse, William J Woodhouse’s daughter.
The collection documents important archaeological sites, significant landscapes of the Greek mainland, religious architecture, contemporary street scenes and village life he encountered during his research trips across the mainland. Portraits of his companions, including family members and guides he employed, are also to be found creating a rich personal account of Greece during this period.
A small selection of Woodhouse’s photographs were published in his work Aetolia: its geography, topography, and antiquities, in 1897. This was the first significant survey of the Aetolian region, recording monuments, historical landscapes and archaeological finds. As Woodhouse articulated in his introduction "History only attains its full value by borrowing actuality from geography and topography" and his early photography was a means through which to study the landscapes and was a key teaching tool when he was appointed to the Chair of Greek at the University of Sydney.
Since releasing the archive on Flickr, key photographs have been identified by specialists working across different areas of Greek heritage and culture as some of the earliest photographic documentation of places in public knowledge or as a different perspective of sites filling previous gaps in knowledge. Publication of select images have now appeared in scientific journal articles, museum publications, local heritage books, and have been shared with the communities which they represent. The entire archive is in the public domain allowing for free publication and sharing of content.
A selection of images from the Woodhouse Archive are displayed in the current exhibition Impressions of Greece. Future installations will feature new images paired with artefacts and artworks from the collection that reveal the connections between ancient and modern Greece, and reflect upon the legacies of Greek culture in modern society.
Featured image (top of the page): [dancing on the pnyx], Athens, Greece 1890–1935, photograph: WJ Woodhouse
You can still contribute to our documentation of this collection and assist us with the identification of the hundreds of different monuments and places in Greece.
To become a contributor all you need to do is head over to our Flickr page and find an image you’d like to write about. To leave a comment you will need to create a Flickr user ID, this is also how we will attribute your work. Once logged in you can begin adding tags and comments on any image.
We are asking contributors to address the following questions:
All of our Flickr contributors will be acknowledged for their involvement in our documentation processes and acknowledged in our online collection catalogue.
To reference or find an image again, each of our images are titled with their registration number following this formula: NM2007.##.##
Flickr notifies us of all new activity on the site, including comments, tags, favourites and followers. Our volunteers, interns and curators read through and record all contributions and then verify crowd-sourced content. This can be done in several ways:
Once an image has been commented on all contributions are archived in the Museum’s database, including the Flickr contributor’s ID and/or name as provided. Verified images will note the method of verification and all references used in the process. Descriptions and tags added by our contributors are also added to the database, with full attribution to the contributor.
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The Woodhouse Archive Flickr Project has been an ongoing case-study for the value of community participation in the documentation of historic photography collections and is part of a larger conversation in museology of the ways in which digital technologies and web platforms can be used by museums to further collection reach and connect with community beyond the walls of the institution. Academic publication and conference papers have included:
Images from the archive have appeared in:
Phone: +61 2 93512812
Email: ccwm.info@sydney.edu.au
Chau Chak Wing Museum
University Place
Camperdown NSW 2050
