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.!
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.!
there is a process burning images into glass cubes.they should last quite a long time unless you break them.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!
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 !there is a process burning images into glass cubes.they should last quite a long time unless you break them.
... distinguished older dogs playing poker that need to be saved for at least 800 years...
I always figured the ephemeral nature of photography to be part of its charm. Also why it's priced the way it is.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.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.
Amen to that!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
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