༘₊ ⊹ ☘︎ Interview » tvwishes ☁︎ ⊹₊
on Flickr, digital preservation, and reappraising the mundane
Before Instagram, there was Flickr. The photo-sharing website was founded in 2004, prior to the widespread use of the cell phone camera. Originally intended for professional photographers, it became home to a wide range of amateur photography: moms photographing their kids, DIY fetish content, fashion bloggers, teens, and Alexa Chung fan pages. Unlike much of the Internet from 20 years ago, Flickr has remained unchanged. As a once active user, it is comforting to be able to access an environment that was part of my online routine for many years. As my distance between my time on the platform grows, the images I’m drawn to have changed. What was once a boring or a “bad” photograph becomes an important memory that must be preserved.
tvwishes is an Instagram account dedicated to sharing photos and videos from Flickr. Evie, the college student based in Missouri who runs the account, visits the site daily, sifting through thousands of images and pulling them from obscurity: a ferret eating a pink lollipop; two teddy bears tucked into bed; teens embracing on a suburban rooftop; an evening lightning storm. tvwishes has accrued a significant following, and many of her fans, like Evie herself, were not active on the platform during its heyday.
“some don’t realize the keen eye it takes, the fervent yearning, the assiduous hunt to compile photos such as these to convey emotions that are so longingly and wistfully expressed in just one snap shot of time.”
“this was someone’s life”
“it's crazy how so many people had the vision for these and they were only understood two decades later”
“literally no way this is real”
I sat down and spoke with Evie about curation, digital ephemera, archives, and how tvwishes guides her own art practice. I also asked Evie to share some of her Flickr favorites for this interview.
I went back and looked at my Flickr account from when I was active (2007-2011) and it was mostly film photography. I'm interested in what you are drawn to on Flickr because you're really honing in on a specific slice of it, similar to photos that I took when I was a teenager but wouldn’t have uploaded to Flickr because they weren’t “art.” They would have been posted to Livejournal or Xanga. It’s interesting because you don’t know which of these sites will remain. I wouldn’t have thought that Flickr was going to be such a treasure trove. Can you describe your introduction to the website, as someone who didn’t grow up using it?
I've had access to the internet from a very young age. I remember getting my first iPod in second grade and having full access to what was available at the time. At 12 years old, I got a Tumblr page. My older sister told me about it.
I would see the same photos get circled around on certain blogs. It's the nature of the internet that often we don't have the sources of images, people don't necessarily always put the source in the caption or whatever. I got really curious as to the source of images, especially images that became popular or became memes. I [wanted to know] where images came from and what made them so alluring to people.
It wasn't until I started to get [into] archival work that I was like, let me just do a reverse Google image search and see if I can find the sources of some of these images. Often it would lead me to Flickr. I assumed that Flickr was just a photo hosting website and not necessarily a social platform. But Flickr has been around since 2004. It began as a social media platform marketed towards professional photographers, but it really became more of a space for amateur photography. I come across a lot of pages that are just like a mom posting photos of her family. I often would come across photos and realize, “Oh my God, I've seen this somewhere.”
A good example of this is that photo of the dog drinking Pepsi. Are you familiar?
Yes.
I found the account of the girl who had posted it. And then I learned all this fun information about the dog in that photo. His name was Peanut. He had a brother named Sesame. There’s all this fun context that I was learning about these images that we see circulate online.
A lot of the photos I would find were taken on digital cameras, older digital cameras, like pre-2010. There's something to be said about the visual quality (image sensors, lens, etc.) of the way that older digital cameras captured life. It’s much different than how your iPhone camera captures life.
I kept coming across these photos that I was familiar with, but then photos that evoked something in me that I couldn't quite explain. I tend to say that “I can’t quite explain” a lot when talking about how my work makes me feel. Despite the loss of words I find myself grappling with, I do have this deep sense of peace and even a sense of purpose when I dig through memories. It makes me feel human.
Flickr tells you how many views a photo has and the likes. I'd come across these photos that no one had seen before. And it felt really special to be viewing a piece of this person's life online from almost 20 years ago. Here I sit looking at someone else's memories that oddly feel like my own. Here I am in 2025 looking at a photo from 2005 that looks like it could have been taken yesterday.
I began posting them on Instagram. I've been doing it for about two years now. I’m on Flickr every day. If I have any sort of spare time, I’m gonna be on Flickr. I feel drawn to the idea of uplifting and preserving the “uneventful” and the routine parts of life. Of course, I am only getting as much context as the users have provided on Flickr. Something that looks mundane to me could have meant the world to the person taking the photo, and that is beautiful in and of itself.
I was born in 2002. I grew up in the early 2000s, but some of these photos were taken when I was just a kid. I feel like I've been able to strike a chord with people, especially my age, who kind of yearn for those times.
Things that were sort of mundane take on this new sheen after a certain amount of time has passed. I even think about my own relationship to images when I was a teenager/in my early twenties. I was really interested in found photography, film photos, and that sort of ephemera. I know that you go to a lot of flea markets and estate sales.
Oh yeah. I was just at an estate sale earlier.
This feels like a continuation of that thread: the feelings about a time that you were technically alive for but weren’t old enough to participate in. That was the 90s for millennials. I wonder if that will always be a thing in culture.
Often I do get comments of people really truly yearning for a time that they didn't experience. Sometimes it can turn into this discussion of like, I don't know, it can turn kind of nihilistic, a little pessimistic about the reality of today. And I get that. We live in a very scary, strange world. But what I'm trying to get out of these photos is not that we need to constantly be yearning for the past, but that we can kind of take notes from, like you said, finding the beauty in the mundane.
I hope for the people who are yearning over these photos, that these experiences are still possible to find today and to capture life in that same way. I get a lot of comments that are like, “I wish it was 2005.” And I get that, I totally do, but it's 2025. We have to learn to navigate the present in a healthier way despite all the chaos.
I read a comment on one of your posts that said, “this helps me realize that if I just put my phone away for a while, a lot of stuff feels exactly the same way it did 20 years ago.” There’s a longing for a time when going online felt like an option or a destination, now it's this ambient thing that everyone is a part of.
I grew up alongside kind of an interesting shift in the internet. I remember being 10 and finding an old digital camera of my grandma’s. Even as a child I was fascinated by the way that these digital cameras captured life and that I found something special in it even then.
I vividly remember the day that YouTube changed their profile pictures from squares to circles. I remember that really bothered me. I thought, “Things are getting a little too modern here. I don't like it.” Even something as simple as the format of a profile photo made me realize at a young age how design keeps getting modernized. I felt that same feeling recently when Instagram changed the aspect ratio of posts. There is a shift in design that can feel innately “wrong” to me. I’ve always been very hyper aware of the relationship between technology and aesthetics and the way that plays into our identity online.
You’re taking these images that are part of one ecosystem and you’re placing them within these other digital ecosystems. What happens when you take an image that’s meant for one platform and move it to another (Instagram or TikTok)? Do you always post music with the photos on Instagram?
I didn’t start paying a lot of attention to the music that I was posting until about a year ago. The music has helped me elevate the feeling that I’m trying to get from a certain collection of images.
Some accounts you find on Flickr, there are only like 100 photos. Then you come across accounts with literally hundreds of thousands of photos. I try to be a curator and try to find the photos that really evoke something in me. The music that I’ve been attaching to the photos has definitely helped push the feeling and make it come across to the viewer.
On a platform like TikTok, people are more likely to randomly stumble upon you, whereas Instagram might yield a more dedicated follower base. I read a comment on one of your TikToks that said, “this is so life core.” Another comment was confused as to where the images were coming from.
I have a bit of a gripe when it comes to trying to put everything into a core and aesthetic, because it diminishes the life that this one thing holds. But yes, a lot of people ask me where I get the photos and I explain it to them. And a lot of people (mostly teens) haven’t really heard of Flickr. They don’t realize that it’s such a powerful tool for images. And again, a lot of these images, no one’s ever seen before. There are lots of things waiting to be found on the internet.
Do you have a favorite year to source photos from?
I get this question asked a lot, “what do you search to find these photos?” The truth is, I don’t have a special formula. I just sit down and whatever comes to my head.
Really, the key is searching by year. So the broadest years that I’ll put will be 1990 to 2010, and that’s pretty broad. What’s interesting about the late 90s is that you start to see the very first digital cameras. They’re harder to find, but that might be my favorite year. Some of the first accessible digital cameras that you could go out and buy were maybe from 1997. Those are the most fascinating to me, really early digital photography. I’m talking 1997 to 2002.
On Flickr most photos will tell you the camera that it was taken on. You can actually click on it and search by certain cameras. I know it sounds silly, but up until I found out about Flickr, I didn’t realize that digital cameras started in the late 90s. I guess I assumed it was an early 2000s thing.
Lately, I’ve been searching from about 2000 to 2005. That’s been my sweet spot. But if I really want a deep dive, it’s fun to try to find really early digital photos.
Are there specific accounts that you come back to, or do you like to keep it moving?
I don’t find myself going back to the same accounts to find photos to upload. I’ll go back to certain accounts to just look through the photos. A lot of these accounts tell a story. I remember one night I was looking at an account that had started uploading photos from their daughter’s childhood in the 90s up until now when she got married. I genuinely started crying because how beautiful is it that I get to see this stranger grow up on the internet? But I get to see it in a period of like 20 minutes. Sometimes I’ll go back to certain accounts just cause it’s fun to see such a slice of life. I’m on Flickr every day, so I’m always coming across new accounts. The amount of favorites I have on Flickr is in the tens of thousands.
Has anyone ever contacted you about posting their photos?
It has happened maybe less than five times. When I first started using TikTok to post the Flickr photos, I had posted a photo of this bedroom and the girl commented, “That’s my bedroom from when I was a teenager.” She was sweet about it.
Yes, these photos are accessible online. I assume that people post them with the intention of being seen, but I still have to be cognizant that these are very personal photos. Often people use their real names on Flickr. Maybe they Google their name and then it comes to my account and they can see. That’s happened a few times where people would be like, “Hey, those were my photos. Thank you for posting them.” People are usually very kind about it. I’m definitely not profiting off of them. The original owners of these photos deserve all the credit in the world. Sources are so important to me. I get a lot of thanks and praise for what I find, and it’s lovely, but I wouldn’t be here without the people of Flickr.
Can you talk to me about your art practice? Does it feel influenced by the images you source?
There are so many different ways that this project has inspired my art. I’m a college student, working off and on. It’s hard to find balance with creative projects in this time of my life. This past semester, I was able to take a film class and get to focus on a film project. Back in middle school, I got really into making Dan and Phil edits on Vine.
What’s Dan and Phil?
Oh my gosh, they were British YouTubers. I was so obsessed with them.
I got really into editing in middle school and I learned really valuable skills from pirating video editing software. I don’t know if I go as far to say that I was making video art, but it started my passion for editing. I was able to make a video art project this past semester and it’s on my YouTube channel. This year, that's a really big goal of mine. I really wanna learn After Effects. I want to get back into editing and video art.
I was watching your YouTube videos and you’re doing vlogs with these older cameras. It's a nice way of playing with the format.
Through tvwishes I’ve found tons of people who are wanting to do the same thing on YouTube, who are reverting back to the authentic or I don’t know, not authentic, but the not super professionalized and perfected forms of video content. Of course, I’d like to try to edit them in a creative way, but there is something about just filming your life on an old camera and that feels very genuine.
Do you think that’s what your followers are interested in? This sincerity or this genuineness, because it feels unvarnished?
For sure. That’s what attracted me to these photos. There are a lot of everyday people who are posting thousands of photos from their camera roll.
I’m really drawn toward photos that kind of feel like they maybe were taken by accident or that were truly candid, because that’s so close to what a real memory feels like. Especially the photos that are slightly blurry and it’s turned up to a ceiling. You’re not really sure what you're looking at, but it’s oddly beautiful. When we talk about ephemera, we’re usually talking about physical things, but there’s something about some of these photos on Flickr that are like digital ephemera.
I’ve noticed that a lot of the stuff you post feels very suburban.
For sure.
A lot of teenage stuff.
I grew up in Missouri in the early 2000s in suburbia. So of course I’m drawn to those aesthetics.
You’re interested in archives but the websites you are posting these images to are equally volatile. Do you have an archival system with the images you gather?
I save a lot of them to my computer. A lot of them are downloaded on my phone. If we’re talking about proper archival organization, I wouldn’t say that I’m necessarily doing it to the best quality. There is important discussion to be had on whether or not social media sites like Instagram act as archives in their own right, but since I have worked in archival institutions I have a hard time considering my work 100% up to par with something like a proper museum or historical society. But I’m glad you brought that up. It’s a very important discussion of how we go about archiving things digitally. For a long time, I assumed that things that exist digitally are more protected than physical items. They’re less prone to disappearing and that’s not true.
Things are very fleeting online. Even when it comes to these Flickr photos, how will they be preserved? I was watching an interview with the COO of Flickr and they actually brought up how they, the people from Flickr themselves, find great importance in making sure that their website stays alive and stays accessible for hundreds of years.
He even said, “I want this platform to be accessible in a hundred years.” The good thing is I feel like Flickr and the team behind Flickr find importance in preserving the site and preserving these images. If I can do anything to help that as well, that’s great. Digital archiving is extremely important. I would love to volunteer for the Internet Archive someday.
Something I really want to tell people is that if you’re interested in archives, you don’t have to be a professional archivist. You can volunteer at your local archives and historical societies. You can do digitizing work as well. I’m so passionate about it. It’s very important to preserve digital culture.
You can find tvwishes on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. See artwork based off of Evie’s Flickr curation here and Evie’s photos here.
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