Is there such a thing as an archival Digital print?

[wiltw]

Longest surviving images are paintings / carvings on cave walls or in pyramids. Thus: in stone. We need a high power laser that will etch the stone from a bitmap. Ink printing nozzle then fills in stone with proper paint. Images in the pyramids still retain color even today after thousands of years.

Expensive process for your holiday snaps. Choose the five or ten best images you've ever made.

OTOH, the images in the pyramids were totally in the dark for thousands of years, and only saw light with their discovery in recent times, and were not subject to fumes of modern chemicals until their unearthing.!

 

[Theo Sulphate]

OTOH, the images in the pyramids were totally in the dark for thousands of years, and only saw light with their discovery in recent times, and were not subject to fumes of modern chemicals until their unearthing.!

Yes, true. So after we "print" our precious images we will have to keep them in darkness, under hermetically sealed conditions. That complicates showing our photos to others.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

you mean every image isn't worth saving for 800 years ?! but the cat was so cute!!! the dogs playing poker was so glib.. say its not so!

there is a process burning images into glass cubes.they should last quite a long time unless you break them.

 

[removed account4]

there is a process burning images into glass cubes.they should last quite a long time unless you break them.

color images too ?! i have a lot of sad clown photographs, kittens with yarn balls being cute, playful puppies and distinguished older dogs playing poker that need to be saved for at least 800 years. can you provide a link to this service i better win the lottery cause i think its gonna cost a lot !

 

[Theo Sulphate]

... distinguished older dogs playing poker that need to be saved for at least 800 years...

None of the dogs around here will let me photograph them while playing poker; they don't want the bitches to know where the money is going.

 

[removed account4]

UT!

 

[jim10219]

I work as a printer using several different processes. We do lithography, inkjet, and toner based prints. I also have a lot of experience as a painter. I can tell you 800 years is a lot to ask out of any paper, including fiber based. If you kept it in a vacuum chamber out of sunlight, maybe. But I wouldn't expect to hang one on a wall, even in a dim room, and see anywhere near that lifespan.

As for longevity of the color, that all has to do with the pigment used. The binder and other chemicals involved will also play a role, but mainly it's going to be the pigments. So to compare an inkjet to a RA4 to a gum print to a whatever is meaningless if your not talking about the specific pigments. And brands of pigments don't matter much. It's the actual chemical used to make the pigment. The same brand may have some pigments that are fairly unreactive and others that are highly reactive to light and pollution. That's why carbon prints and platinum prints last so long. These pigments are highly stable and don't react to the environment much. Color prints are always going to be less robust because there isn't a good magenta or cyan pigment or dye that will last a long time. You could make a color print using a more lightfast red or blue, but you'd struggle to get accurate color representation.

So the most archival color print process would avoid the traditional CMYK process, and need to be made using lightfast pigments in a non traditional way. That would probably require some very expensive software and lots of trial and error if you wanted semi accurate colors.

All in all, you have to ask yourself, is it worth worrying about archivalness? And to what degree? If you wanted it to last 1,000 years, it wouldn't be in a situation where people could enjoy it. Besides, you'll be long dead, and likely forgotten. Not to mention the trillions of new art works that will have entered the world making yours easily forgotten. And even if you are a once in a generation level artist whose works do endure, would fading prints even matter? Look at the work of Van Gogh! His reds have just about all faded away, yet his work is some of the most desirable out there!

If your photographs are truly worthy of lasting for 1,000's of years, they will. If not through their own archival nature, then through meticulous reproductions that future generations will commission to ensure they are not lost to the ravages of time. It's the idea, not the paper, that holds the value.

 

[Bob Carnie]

Nice post Jim.. I am indeed concerned about prints lasting... on different FB groups I am on it is very enjoyable to view the works of Japanese photographers and their hand coloured albumen prints, I am glad there were people back then doing this work and even though not a classic masterpiece these very old images give a glimpse into our past and it is an important issue in my mind at least.

 

[jamesaz]

I always figured the ephemeral nature of photography to be part of its charm. Also why it's priced the way it is.

 

[removed account4]

I always figured the ephemeral nature of photography to be part of its charm. Also why it's priced the way it is.

hi jamesaz
I couldn't agree more. I have been making ephemeral photographs for I don't know how many years. I take a sheet of photo paper and put it in a camera and leave the shutter open for hours sometimes even more than a day. there is an image "burned" on the paper that lasts a little while and eventually it vanishes. I have made ULF cameras to expose these paper images ( I think the biggest was 22x30 or something ). I also do contact prints and photograms in the sun the same way. The images don't last, they are sort of unfixable and undevelopable. I have some that i've found in a box that are about 6 or 8 years old and still look perfect. I think this ephemeral quality is great. Its like entropy and de evolution all wrapped up into a delicious fortune cookie that says " enjoy while you can, tomorrow may be here fast". I sometimes cheat though. I use a scanner and fiddle around with it so it lasts a little while longer. I'm sure cosmic rays and muons are messing with my hard drive, and electronics fail just like fancy papers and pigments. I'm enjoying them while they are still around cause tomorrow will be here before I know it !

 

[wiltw]

When the 'ephemeral' photo is one that has a notable celebrity in it, lots of folks have interest in seeing it, even 52 years after that photo was taken and the celebrity passed away (two years later).
I have a Tri-X negative shot backstage at a performance of Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1967-68, and Janis Joplin has come out of the dressing room where the other band members are still relaxing before the performance, and she is waving pleasantly at me taking her photo. The Tri-X negative is still in perfect condition, in spite of less than museum quality storage in the interim! And it still scans wonderfully without any tweaking of the scanned image (apart from dust on the negative that has not been cleaned off prior to scan).

 

[BMbikerider]

I work part time in an Industrial Museum in UK and after me demonstrating how digital images degrade in a quite short time the management have agreed to revert to black and white only. Colour C41 negatives can/will show colour shifts after quite a short time so are not the most stable form for preservation. The life of B&W images in the negative form have a proven lifespan if carefully stored in optimum conditions of at least 100 years or more.

Yes, prints are made for display and sale but we will not guarantee their lifespan. Digital is not used simply because who is to say there will be equipment available to read the storage medium in as short a time as even 20 years. Look how floppy discs have virtually disappeared and CD's are now on the same path. Cloud storage is also discounted on the grounds of security and copyright issues. Put simply it is still evolving and who knows what we will have in the future.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

I work as a printer using several different processes. We do lithography, inkjet, and toner based prints. I also have a lot of experience as a painter. I can tell you 800 years is a lot to ask out of any paper, including fiber based. If you kept it in a vacuum chamber out of sunlight, maybe. But I wouldn't expect to hang one on a wall, even in a dim room, and see anywhere near that lifespan.

As for longevity of the color, that all has to do with the pigment used. The binder and other chemicals involved will also play a role, but mainly it's going to be the pigments. So to compare an inkjet to a RA4 to a gum print to a whatever is meaningless if your not talking about the specific pigments. And brands of pigments don't matter much. It's the actual chemical used to make the pigment. The same brand may have some pigments that are fairly unreactive and others that are highly reactive to light and pollution. That's why carbon prints and platinum prints last so long. These pigments are highly stable and don't react to the environment much. Color prints are always going to be less robust because there isn't a good magenta or cyan pigment or dye that will last a long time. You could make a color print using a more lightfast red or blue, but you'd struggle to get accurate color representation.

So the most archival color print process would avoid the traditional CMYK process, and need to be made using lightfast pigments in a non traditional way. That would probably require some very expensive software and lots of trial and error if you wanted semi accurate colors.

All in all, you have to ask yourself, is it worth worrying about archivalness? And to what degree? If you wanted it to last 1,000 years, it wouldn't be in a situation where people could enjoy it. Besides, you'll be long dead, and likely forgotten. Not to mention the trillions of new art works that will have entered the world making yours easily forgotten. And even if you are a once in a generation level artist whose works do endure, would fading prints even matter? Look at the work of Van Gogh! His reds have just about all faded away, yet his work is some of the most desirable out there!

If your photographs are truly worthy of lasting for 1,000's of years, they will. If not through their own archival nature, then through meticulous reproductions that future generations will commission to ensure they are not lost to the ravages of time. It's the idea, not the paper, that holds the value.

the good point you are making is that people often forget with print longevity that the paper itself has a limited life.as far as the actual dies or p-igments go, I like to add that we have no idea what type of environmental contaminents are likely to face over the next 200 years.

 

[Jim Jones]

We can still enjoy the film Gone With the Wind in all its Technicolor glory, even though the versions that were exhibited in theaters may have faced. The same basic technology, although complicated and expensive, may be the answer to preserving today's ephemeral color images.

 

[Photo Engineer]

Prints and negatives can last for decades if not longer. I have several prints and negatives dating from the '50s. They are still good. What I learned at EK doing these studies is that stability of all analog materials (including B&W), depends on the quality of the process. Skimp on anything and they go bad fast. Do it right and things stay around for years and years.

PE

 

[Photo Engineer]

As for the main topic, digital print stability, well that is all over the map depending on the paper itself and on the inks used. And then, there is the often ignored topic of image spread with digital prints. The dyes tend to wander and the image becomes less sharp with time. This has been a shown problem but rather "hidden".

There are some threads on this elsewhere on Photrio where I have posted some image stability tests.

PE

 

[Stephen Prunier]

Does this mean I wasted my money having all my images printed on Plywood and Plexiglass? Just kidding, that will never happen. I'd be fine just knowing someone liked my work 100 years from now.

 

[removed account4]

Does this mean I wasted my money having all my images printed on Plywood and Plexiglass? Just kidding, that will never happen. I'd be fine just knowing someone liked my work 100 years from now.

When I met David Prifti years ago ( the summer before he passed ) he showed me his prints on plywood that he did using liquid emulsion
at that point they were IDK 25-30 years old and still looked beautiful. From what I remember they were in a storage building ( barn? shed? ) on his property
in a New England state that gets a variety of weathers ( cold, hot, wet, dry, humid &c ). Who knows, maybe your prints on plexiglass and plywood will stand up too ?

YMMV

 

[BMbikerider]

You were too optimistic. On what basis did you have that impression?
These "museums" need to get out of their cocoon. Color pigment inkjets surpassed their chemical counterparts more than a decade ago in longevity. Carbon inkjet prints can do the same against silver gelatin.

Not so. I work with a museum where they are obliged to store the smaller exhibits and images in carefully controlled conditions so there is no detrioration or at the very least the deterioration is delayed as long as possible. Colour images of whatever type are known to deteriorate far quicker than monochrome or handwritten or tyoped script. For the longest life of paper based records a number of the more important ones are copying them using B&W film to store the records on as they have a proven life span of over 150 years, even if they are stored indifferently.

Simulated ageing is exactly that! There is no guarantee that these simulations will actually be proof of the life of what is recorded. It is a best guess no more no less.The way they are stored will affect the longevity which will in itself throw the estimated lifespan of an image out of the window if not stored in the best possible conditions.

Even images stored on hard discs or CD's will fall of the shelf in quite a short time. I have or used to have CD's with images on which refused to open because with age - mine were about 15 years old, the discs had become corrupted. There again who is to say there will be equipment around in say 25 years that will be capable of reading what is stored. This is another reason why they are reverting to film to store records because they don't need specialist electronic equipment to read what is recorded.

I have been involved with photography since 1962/3 and still have a number of prints dating from around that time and they are still good and usable (although of subjects long outdated.) I have RA4 colour prints which are about 30 years old and they are starting to look a bit jaded, but I have negatives almost as old as the B&W prints that are still printable and as good as the day I developed them. (Apart from a few scratches. that is!)

 

[bdial]

Recordable CD's and DVD's use dyes in the data recording layer, and so are subject to the same kinds of degradation that other dye-based materials are. When I looked into this a few years ago, recordable CD's and DVD's were rated to have a 10-15 year average life at best. The other problem with CD and DVD media is that it's quite fragile, it doesn't take much handling to cause scratches that cause data loss for some files, or sometimes the whole disk.

In the digital computer document archiving world, the normal procedure is to move the files to new media as required when a given media type (or software, or other hardware) becomes obsolete. Individuals have the same options, and even though the scale of the expense is much less for an individual, it's not cheap, but necessary if you're interested in preserving the work over time. Currently magnetic hard drives are the most cost effective, though solid state drives with reasonable capacity are becoming available at competitive prices.

 

[jim10219]

Recordable CD's and DVD's use dyes in the data recording layer, and so are subject to the same kinds of degradation that other dye-based materials are. When I looked into this a few years ago, recordable CD's and DVD's were rated to have a 10-15 year average life at best. The other problem with CD and DVD media is that it's quite fragile, it doesn't take much handling to cause scratches that cause data loss for some files, or sometimes the whole disk.

In the digital computer document archiving world, the normal procedure is to move the files to new media as required when a given media type (or software, or other hardware) becomes obsolete. Individuals have the same options, and even though the scale of the expense is much less for an individual, it's not cheap, but necessary if you're interested in preserving the work over time. Currently magnetic hard drives are the most cost effective, though solid state drives with reasonable capacity are becoming available at competitive prices.

Again, it depends on which CD, DVD, Blu Ray, disc we're talking about. CD-R's have gotten a bad rap due to some of the earlier ones that were made with inferior dyes. Later ones switched to much more stable dyes and are though to last for decades longer.

Also, the dyes are light sensitive, so if you leave them out in the light, they'll degrade much more quickly. The polypropylene discs are sensitive to scratches, however, they too will last a lot longer if maintained in a dark, climate controlled environment. And unlike a physical print, with a CD, DVD, whatever, you're not going to be accessing it that often, so leaving them in a dark, climate controlled environment, like a case in a closet in your house, makes sense and will greatly extend their lifespan without too much cost.

All in all, they are much more reliable for long term storage than magnetic tape and especially solid state drives. The magnetized particles on the tape (or any magnetic media) will lose their charge over time, and if they aren't rewritten every few years, will eventually become useless. Also, the tape itself is made of polymers and susceptible to degradation over time. Still tape is better than the old platter hard drives. And solid state drives are the worst for long term storage (but the best for speed). Getting ten years out of a solid state drive would be a miracle.

Though your right. No media last forever. If something is being archived, it should be copied and periodically recopied onto new media. Archivalness is a long term process, not a short term one. So while optical discs are currently the best media the average consumer has access too for long lasting data storage, they're not perfect. And the most important thing to remember to ensure the archival stability of anything is to keep copies in multiple locations. Because it doesn't matter what you store it on, if it gets burned in a fire or washed away in a flood, it's gone forever.

Recently it was announced that Universal Studio had a bunch of master tapes of many, many famous and important recordings lost in a huge fire. They didn't keep copies on an offsite, because they believed their storage methods were safe enough. They were not. The real problem isn't the loss of the master for John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin, R.E.M., Nirvana, Joni Mitchel, Beck, Janet Jackson, and more. Luckily, their music will live one because of the countless records they've sold and how many copies exist out in the real world. The real tragedy is all of the out takes, unreleased music, and lesser known musicians who's music doesn't exist in the public collection and was lost for all time. This is the stuff that died on June 1, 2008.

 

[RalphLambrecht]

Prints and negatives can last for decades if not longer. I have several prints and negatives dating from the '50s. They are still good. What I learned at EK doing these studies is that stability of all analog materials (including B&W), depends on the quality of the process. Skimp on anything and they go bad fast. Do it right and things stay around for years and years.

PE

Amen to that!