The Story of WikiPortraits

Wikipedia’s articles are amazing but the photos are horrible.

There’s a reason for that. Every photo on Wikipedia has to be uploaded with a Creative Commons license - which means you contribute it to the public domain and forfeit your right to get paid for it. Professional photographers don’t upload their work to Wikipedia because their whole business model is making money from their photos. As a result, most photos on Wikipedia come from amateurs. Often it’s just some person at an airport being like, “Oh my God, it’s Pete Davidson” and taking a photo with an iPhone.

That’s a bigger problem than it sounds. When you google someone, their Wikipedia article is the first result that comes up - and their Wikipedia photo is the first thing you see. For a public figure, their Wikipedia photo basically becomes their official portrait - whether they like it or not.

Portraits on Wikipedia are so bad there are Instagram pages dedicated to them: Bad Wikipedia Photos, Bad Wiki Photos.

My friend Jenny 8. Lee decided to do something about it. She noticed I had a $3,000 professional camera and kept buying more lenses… even though the only time I ever took photos was at my own parties - and the only people who ever saw photos were the friends whose photos I’d taken.

She said, “If I could get you a press pass to take photos of celebrities at South by Southwest, would you want to do it?” Um, yes? For a hobbyist photographer, it was a dream.

I went to SXSW and took photos of Conan O’Brien on stage that almost immediately got added to his Wikipedia page. I also photographed Nick Kroll, Pamela Adlon, Mike Judge, Ray Kurzweil, and Vinod Kosla.

That was two years ago. Since then, I’ve traveled to film festivals and cultural events around the world, including Sundance, the Toronto Film Festival, Edinburgh Fringe, the International Festival of Journalism in Perugia, the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm and Oslo, the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, and the Busan Film Festival in Korea. And now my photos are viewed by 10 million people a month.

Today, WikiPortraits photographers have covered around 10 global festivals and ceremonies and taken nearly 5,000 freely-licensed photos. Photos by WikiPortraits photographers are used on Wikipedia articles in over 120 languages, viewed up to 100 million times a month. When publicists ask what our readership is, we say 1.5 billion people. We usually get credentialed. 🙂

The celebrities are often into it. At a New York screening of The Apprentice, I found Jeremy Strong of Succession, whose Wikipedia photo was from 2014. His publicist said no. But Jeremy said, “Wait, you’re from Wikipedia? For the love of God, please take down that photo. You’d be doing me a service, I’d be forever in your debt.” He posed and I got the shot.

The trick on the red carpet isn’t getting natural expressions out of celebrities - they’re professionals, they can give you a warm smile for hours. The trick is getting them to look at your lens when every photographer in the pit is calling their name. I’ve tried wearing a red Switzerland flag hat and yelling “over here in the red hat!” I’ve called people by their character names. I got Ana de Armas’s attention by saying, “Oye, Ana, por aqui, por favor!” She looked right at me and gave me the sweetest smile. Click, got the shot.

WikiPortraits isn’t just about better photos. Most notable people of color aren’t represented with high-quality portraits on Wikipedia, and closing that gap is a major part of why the project exists. Wikipedia shapes how the world sees people. If the photos are bad, or missing entirely, that’s a problem worth fixing.

Jenny and her co-founder Kevin Payravi keep expanding to new kinds of events. We’ve covered Sundance, SXSW, the Toronto International Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, the Nobel Prizes in Stockholm and Oslo, the Jaipur Literature Festival, and CES in Las Vegas. We’re just getting started.

We’re a team of 30+ volunteer photographers. If you want to join us, help fund travel and equipment, or just learn more, visit WikiPortraits.org or get in touch.