Saving What Vanishes: The Radical Work of Scanning Parties

Words by s. leimbach

Welcome to Los Angeles — a city in constant flux, where entire blocks can transform multiple times in a single year [1], where “new” is always celebrated, and where the traces of what came before can vanish almost overnight.

Disappearance in LA occurs on a wide scale of timelines. It can be slow: a community center loses funding, a neighborhood website that is no longer maintained. It can be sudden: a family displaced in an ICE raid, their belongings abandoned, decades of personal archives gone in an instant. And sometimes it slips away quietly, lost in the gaps, where no one thought to look because it all seemed too ordinary to save.

In this city, whole chapters of local history — particularly those rooted in Black, brown, queer, immigrant, and working-class communities — are at risk of disappearing. Archival practices have long been shaped by structures of privilege, where dominant cultural narratives are preserved, while counter-histories are marginalized or excluded altogether. As a result, the everyday lives and cultural practices of oppressed communities are often misrepresented, decontextualized, or rendered invisible within institutional memory.
This is where scanning parties can step in. 

SCANNING AS A CELEBRATION

A scanning party is an informal happening where a community digitizes their own ephemera: flyers, photos, newsletters, zines, home videos, recipes. They can unfold anywhere community life gathers — living rooms, block parties, neighborhood libraries — where people come together to share stories and care for collective memory. Rooted in a DIY ethic, scanning parties are not high-budget operations. They center mutual care and the belief that everyone has the right to safeguard their stories. 

You don’t need to be a trained archivist to host a scanning party. All it takes is a scanner, a laptop, and a few people willing to share their time and stories [2]. The best scanning parties include food and music and take place somewhere comfortable — por qué no? 

Together, scanning party participants transform archiving from a task into a ritual, fostering intergenerational trust and knowledge exchange.

Above all, what matters is accessibility and reciprocity: Who will get to see what is collected? Who controls access? How do we protect sensitive materials? Who benefits from the scans? These questions can be explored during the scanning party — when your community is gathered, sharing stories, food and music. It's the perfect setting not just for collective archiving, but for discussing these ethical questions around access. 

Community resources like the Culture in Transit Toolkit and Community Archiving Handbook provide helpful frameworks for ethical, care-based practices. They’re excellent guides to reference when planning your first scanning party.

Image Source: New York Metropolitain Library’s GitHub

CREATIVE ARCHIVES IN ACTION

Digitization alone isn’t enough. A scanned image tucked away on a private hard drive might as well not exist.

Community archives thrive when materials are open and shared — searchable, browsable, and, most importantly, available to the people who created them.

This approach is at the heart of the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), which works with LA artists to preserve materials that might otherwise slip from the record. LACA offers an online, searchable platform where anyone can browse the archive — or contribute their own materials — keeping the collection alive and connected to the communities it documents. Hosting a scanning party can be one way to participate: scans uploaded to LACA become part of a living archive accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Home page of the LA Archive website

A similar spirit guides Guadalupe Rosales’ ⟣Veteranas y Rucas⟢ What began as a personal practice of collecting and scanning party flyers, 35mm photos, and other everyday ephemera from SoCal Chicano youth culture has grown into an expansive community archive. Through Instagram and exhibitions, Rosales reclaims histories often stereotyped or ignored, reframing them as living testimony of cultural expression. Her work shows how personal digitization efforts can ripple outward, shaping collective memory and cultural storytelling. 

Community archives in Los Angeles offer additional ways for these materials to live and circulate. The ONE Archives at USC LIbraries in Los Angeles actively collects new items from community members — personal papers, photographs, organizational records, and ephemera — ensuring that the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in Los Angeles are preserved and continually enriched. ONE demonstrates how community contributions, like those from scanning parties, feed into a broader, living historical record.

 @veteranas_and_rucas instagram profile

Cover of The Underground Museum's FEB Magazine

Similarly The Underground Museum’s ⟣FEB Magazine⟢ highlights the creative potential of digitized materials. What began in 2009 as a photo blog documenting scanned photos and digital ephemera eventually manifested in print in 2017 as FEB Magazine. This project shows how everyday materials can be transformed into new forms of storytelling, reaching audiences beyond traditional archives.

Spread from The Underground Museum's FEB Magazine, designed by Lee Harrison Creative 

A PRACTICE WORTH KEEPING

For communities whose histories have too often gone undocumented or distorted, scanning parties can be an invitation — a welcome into the resistance and the beginning of collective memory. 

Disappearance isn’t inevitable. It’s what happens when memory is overlooked or treated as disposable. Every file scanned is a refusal. Every photo saved is a disruption. Every scanning party is a collective act of remembering — and a declaration:

We were here. We are still here. And we will not be erased.

1.  See @thisplaceofhoover: https://www.instagram.com/thissideofhoover/
2.  If you don’t have access to a scanner, check out the LA Public Library’s DIY Memory Lab at the Octavia Lab, LA Central Library

⟣ DISAPPEARANCE ⟢
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Editors 
Akosa · Stephanie Becker · Elena Diebel · Catherine Falls · Jenny Galipo
Sarah Jardini · Lisa Kahn · SL Leimbach · Vern Molidor · Kelli Yakabu

Editor-in-Chief
Jen Neville

Design
Zaira Torres

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