collectedvisions.net was created by Lorie Novak in collaboration with Clilly Castiglia, Betsey Kershaw, and Kerry O'Neill in 1996.

Searching for ways to penetrate the isolated world of my family’s photographs, I began collecting snapshots from friends and colleagues in 1993. An invitation in 1995 by the now defunct NYU Center for Advanced Technology to use the interactivity of the then new “World Wide Web” led to the creation of the Collected Visions website. Created in collaboration with Clilly Castiglia, Betsy Kershaw, and Kerry O’Neill, Collected Visions grew into an archive of over 3,000 family photos collected from more than 300 people. The most significant aspect of the site is the ability it gives people to choose or contribute images and then create and submit photo essays.

The majority of the approximately 250 submitted stories are ones where the authors wrote about photographs that are not their own. In itself, one’s own family’s archive may not be that revealing, and much was not photographed. With so many similar and rigid photographic conventions, determining the parameters of family photography, it is often the narratives that are most illuminating. Some authors claim photos as their own, while others confess that the photo could have been theirs but is not. In order to emphasize possibilities of multiple and evolving truths, I do not reveal who the photographs belong to. My interest in family photographs has always centered around the fact that their relationship to truth is slippery and malleable—how photos can contradict as well as unleash our memories and hint to the unseen.

A second component of the project is  Collected Visions, a computer-based installation with music by Elizabeth Brown.