95% to 99% of human history is unrecorded and unknown. Modern Homo Sapiens developed roughly 200,000 to 300,000 years ago, but the written word was only invented about 5,000 to 6,000 years ago. This means only the last 1% to 5% of our existence is documented through written texts, which isn’t much. The visual record of humanity is even more scarce. Photography was invented in 1826 but not available to the consumer until 1888. Thanks to the original Kodak camera we now have 138 years (about four and a half generations) of visual documentation of the average, normal human life, again not very much. As a result of new technology, specifically the digitalization of photography begun in the 1990s, we very well may lose our photographic record of current daily life. Even though we take more pictures than ever before --over a trillion photos globally, annually, fewer and fewer are likely to survive into the future. How can this be?
The reason is the double-edged sword of ever-changing and ever-improving technology.
Although I and others foresaw this early on, it really hit home for me personally about fifteen years ago. I was in the attic of my parents’ home. It was just after my father’s funeral, and my mom would be moving into a nursing home which would be partially funded by the sale of their house, after I got the place cleaned out. I was going through decades of stuff when I found a large collection of photographs. It was an historic sampling of every kind of 20th century photographic media from color drugstore prints to Polaroids, slides –including Anscochrome, Ektachrome and Kodachromes, old sepia-toned black and white prints and even tintypes from the 19th century. The storage conditions were aggressively less than ideal, and these pictures had been ‘cooking’ in the Texas heat and humidity for over forty years! All the black and white photos I found were in relatively good condition as were the Kodachrome slides, which were as bright and colorful as the day they were picked up from the photo-lab. But the 1960s-1970s era Anscochrome and Ektachrome slides along with all the color prints from the drugstores were faded to near nothingness because the dyes used at the time were unstable. I could hold the Kodachrome slides up to the windowlight and see what the pictures were, and the black and white prints were all easily viewable.
Those pictures still exist and are viewable because they are actual things. They are artifacts, actual physical representations of the things photographed. They are savable, collectible and possibly valuable. I personally retrieved these photographs and have archived and preserved them in optimum conditions for the long-term in a cool, dark, low-humidity environment.
The future will be different. In the future, heirs and Estate salespeople won’t find many prints, slides or negatives. They won’t find a thing, they will find data, data stored on a variety of what will then be ‘vintage’ media. To view the data will require more time and effort than most will want to expend. This is where the record of the times gets lost.
You can’t hold a digital file up to the window like a slide or negative to see what it is. No, a digital-file image is going to require electricity, a computer with the proper software and whatever hardware necessary to view the images stored on whatever media format is found. And who’s to say that in the future there will even be hardware and software available to read such things as: floppy disks, SyQuest Data Cartridges, Jazz disks, Zip disks, CDs, DVDs, CF cards, SD cards, or even thumb-drives. I hope my USB hard drives will work in the future, but who knows?
It’s the imagery encoded on digital media storage that we’re going to lose in the future. Three main factors come into play which leads to the loss of this part of the consumer-photographic-historical-record. First is data-corruption. Magnetic and Optical storage is not indestructible, and data can be lost over time. Secondly, it’s highly likely that the hardware/software to read these formats will no longer exist, making the imagery non-viewable. Thirdly, the person going through the photographic archives must give a damn about the photography and have the time to view the pictures –and most won’t. Many of those people will not have known the deceased and they’ll be pressed for time which means the photography will get tossed in the trash, unseen. Nobody cares about your stupid pictures. A legacy will be lost. History will be undiscovered.
Occasionally iPhone Photographers ask me, “I’ve got four-hundred pictures on my phone, how do I archive them?” They never like my two-word response: “Print them.” No, they don’t want to print, heck, most ‘photographs’ today never get printed. They’re disposable or one-time-viewing and exist only in the memory of some device. These photos are never ‘made real’ and printed to become an artifact in our 3-D world, no, they only exist as unexpressed, unseen and ephemeral encoded ones and zeros. Unless the photograph is printed, made viewable without a device, it’s not ‘real’ if it doesn’t exist as a physical thing. Even copyright law states that an image must be “fixed in a tangible medium.”
If this first generation, the 1.0 era of digital photography, isn’t properly preserved then looking back at this time from a future perspective only an image-desert will be seen. A CD or hard drive is not a picture. Some fine art photography will be preserved because it will be printed, most commercial photography will also be preserved because it is perceived as having value, but the average person’s record of their life will be forever lost to time. History will be full of visual holes and incomplete …and we just started documenting this stuff only a few generations ago.
It’s highly unlikely that the future will give us another cache of lost ‘Marilyn Monroe-type’ photos. It’s doubtful that anything of historical significance will be found on some old Zip disk. These things won’t exist, and if they do, they might not be found or viewed. Would anyone find the old equipment necessary to view or copy the photos? Would they care? Again, it’s improbable.
The only thing that can be done to prevent this data-history loss is to move the imagery from the virtual world into the real world by making prints. Yeah, print the ‘good’ or ‘important’ pictures! And good printing will be necessary, not some cheap print on copy paper from an office printer. High quality, archival pigment or photographic prints will need to be made if they are going to last. Prints should be stored archivally and not in a shoebox, but people today seldom consider the future, and most will not do this. A large quantity of digital files quickly becomes overwhelming to print. As professionals we ‘print as we go’ and archive them. Nobody’s going to want to convert, organize and print hundreds of photos from their phone. Our future, consumer-level, visual history will not be as rich as the 1890-1990 photographic era. Chemical-analog photography started the archive; digital photography may well end it.
If it was important enough to point a camera at, it’s important enough to save. Preserve the moment, print the picture.
Dale is author of Nobody Cares about your Stupid Pictures
Available from Amazon.com
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