About Us

More about Substrate.

We started out in 2017 as the Image Collections Preservation Network and over time realized that our mission was less about professionalizing and more about connecting and supporting the people, places, and efforts that go into making, seeing, and keeping images.

So here we are, starting fresh and taking everything we’ve learned forward into the next iteration.

Substrate facilitates intellectual, emotional, physical, and social connections to images, image makers and caretakers, and image-based collections across disciplines and communities. ‘Images’ is defined broadly to include analogue and digital-born works of moving, still, mixed, and web-based media. Substrate embraces the values of inclusivity, interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, innovation, and interaction across makers, communities, knowledge bases, and practices related to images, image-making, and image repositories.