The 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival Photo Sharing Project encourages visitors to post and tag their images of the 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival to the group page, http://www.flickr.com/groups/sff2007/. This Flickr page will allow visitors to participate in the documentation of the Festival, while encouraging community and interaction that extends the Festival experience beyond the National Mall.

Throughout the time of the Festival, a selection of the images posted to the Flickr group will be highlighted on the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's Web site, http://photography.si.edu/exhibitions.aspx, and on the Smithsonian Folklife Festival Web site, http://www.folklife.si.edu/festival/2007/index.html. At the end of the Festival, the photos contributed by Festival visitors will be organized into a final online exhibition. The images also will be archived with both the Smithsonian Photography Initiative and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.

The project strives to strengthen both Smithsonian Folklife Festival's mission of promoting cultural democracy, visitor participation and cross-cultural conversation and the Smithsonian Photography Initiative's mission to document how photography plays an integral role in people's lives and throughout the Institution.

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 Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The Festival takes place for two weeks every summer, overlapping with the Fourth of July. It is an educational presentation that features community-based cultural exemplars. The Festival, like the Smithsonian museums, is free and open to the public; it typically draws more than one million visitors each year.

The 2007 Smithsonian Folklife Festival runs from June 27 to July 1 and July 4 to 8 and features three programs: "Mekong River: Connecting Cultures," "Northern Ireland at the Smithsonian" and "Roots of Virginia Culture."

About the Smithsonian Photography Initiative
The Smithsonian Photography Initiative creates opportunities for innovative new uses of images and photography throughout the Smithsonian. Through its award winning Web site, www.photography.si.edu, the Smithsonian Photography Initiative provides a platform for engaging visitors in an open dialogue about photography and its influence on society.

The Smithsonian Photography Initiative was created in 2001 to encourage the use and understanding of the unparalleled collections of photographs and camera technology that exist throughout the Smithsonian Institution's museums of art, history and science. The Smithsonian and photography both have their origins in the mid-19th century and have grown together in the more than 150 years since; the Institution now holds more than 13 million images in some 200 discrete collections, and the number is growing.

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