One aspect of film photography that doesn't get talked about enough is its permanency, archive-ability and recoverability.
An image exists, physically, in a tangible medium, that - importantly - cost real money to produce. Each image thus has a real, tangible financial value, beyond whether or not it's actually an 'image worth keeping' . Therefore, whether you store it neatly in acid-free sleeves in organised folders in a humidity-controlled room, or shove the negs in a shoebox in the back of your wardrobe, there is a natural tendency to hang onto them.
Or at least I would have thought so. Kids these days... /s
I wouldn't consider myself pedantic or a natural hoarder, but I have the negatives and slides for literally every roll of film I've shot in my life (save for my absolute first roll of 110 I shot when I was 10, but I still have the original prints) rolling back to 1995. They're all in a plastic tub, the same one I've had since 1998, some stored with some care, a lot still in the original paper envelopes that came with the prints. While 50%+ of its contents are unremarkable images of a young bloke learning the craft, many of those negatives have been dug out with relative ease to be reprinted or rescanned in the years since, as needed. That tub's been dragged through no less than 17 address changes in three states in 25+ years, even after I had basically abandoned film from mid 2000s to the mid 2010s.
During the same period of time, I hate to think how many digital photos I've lost. I know my iPhoto library was in the tens of thousands already by 2005, and while most of those images were merely snaps taken with an Olympus compact or early phone/PDA cameras, there are important life moments that I'm sure have been lost through a mix of many dying computers, failing hard drives and rotting CD-Rs/DVD-Rs.
Many years ago I watched a presentation by recording engineer/producer Steve Albini (I'll try and find it online later). For those unaware, Albini was responsible for the production of Nirvana's In Utero, PJ Harvey's Rid Of Me, early Pixies stuff and his own work with Big Black amongst hundreds of other albums, and was a staunch champion of straight up recordings on analogue tape as the digital tape-based and later hard-drive/computer based audio systems (DAWs) became the norm.
The concept of sticking with analogue 'because it sounds better' was by no means new, but Albini, surprisingly, stated his primary rationale for sticking with expensive, maintenance-heavy 24 trk analogue decks was archival. To heavily paraphrase from memory:
"These recordings I make are in many cases the only real evidence that a band existed. I owe it to them to ensure the recordings remain listenable into the future. The early digital tape systems used metal oxide tape that's now falling apart, recorded on machines that are no longer made and supported and are falling apart, and those recordings are being lost. Computer systems have come and gone, hard drives die. Yet I can take an analogue tape recorded 40-50 years ago, and play it back. Maybe it needs a little time in the oven to avoid ferric oxide loss, maybe there's some loss of high end fidelity... or maybe it'll sound better because it's being played back on equipment much newer and capable than what it was recorded on back in the day... but I can play you back something you can hear."
I feel there's a lot of parallel with photography in that. Yes, prints, negatives and slides certainly aren't impervious to damage and decay over time... but even with a damaged piece of film, you can still tell what it is... and it can be rescanned at the highest resolution available of the day and digitally cleaned up with the best tools of the day.
If digital files aren't saved in three different copies in three different places... one scratched CD-R, one cup of coffee over a laptop or one errant OS update... it's all gone.
So yeah... if you do nothing else... put your negs into a box ;-)
