Interesting that you say it's not true when there are academic conferences held for archivists solely on the problems of futureproofing storage. If you work for, say, the British Museum, there may be a budget for transferring digital technologies as long as the museum maintains its funding streams. But the average Joe's photo collection are not the priceless artefacts that demand full time staff salaries testing the data, maintaining humidity and copying it to whatever format comes along in perpetuity. More likely it will be a few hard drives someone inherits with a letter saying it contains the pictures of a camera nut uncle. Is a non-photographer going to hook it up and look through a few hundred thousand photographs, and preserve them in the format of the day - if their computer has recognisable ports - or get on with their life and leave it to someone else?
A community archive is not an individual's photographic collection. A museum or library have a commitment to preserving the material they are custodians of. They cannot hope to preserve a fraction of a percentage of the work out there, nor have they any idea what future generations will consider important.
You are taking a purely technological position on data storage. No one is arguing that data can be preserved given sufficient resources and motivation. The reason personal photographs are saved in an immediately accessible format by successive generations is the issue. As data becomes more prolific there is less reason to save it all, less motive to search out what is and isn't relevant, and changes in technology influence peoples' motivation and accessibility. Immediacy of content is the advantage of a personal collection, archival permanency is the priority of a community resource that has been preselected.
Exactly. I don't think people have taken on board the practical or cultural implications of technological change. In the last 30 years there have been a plethora of still and moving image formats and interfaces, and there's no reason to think the future will lessen that proliferation. It may not even be the equivalent of storing on a video disk or 8mm cartridge which offers the possibility that someone, somewhere will have a working machine, and the new owner will care enough to pay to have the information transferred. It'll probably be more like finding your life's work on Polaroid's short-lived movie format, with no existing manufacturer, a defunct technology and a handful of thoroughly dead machines.
Interestingly the advent of 5.24" floppy disks coincided with my serious interest in photography. They came out in 1976, I started shooting film in earnest in 1975. I don't know if a single floppy would be able to hold all the information a single 35mm negative, I suspect not. In that time all kinds of storage media have come and gone, and apart from scanning my negatives for USB hard drives in recent years, I've done nothing to them apart from print. If I'd been able to photograph on a five-and-a-quarter inch disk, how many generations of technology would I have had to pursue to keep them up to date?
I agree. My default method is printed books. I get to say what order, size and shape the images are seen, and can introduce text if it's important. I can make silver prints and C-types from the negatives, and scan them for my records. I recently presented such a book to my in-laws who were blown away and described it as an "heirloom". The same shots on an iPad would be flicked through and forgotten in 5 minutes. That's the effect printed matter has on people. There's no comparison between the engagement of an image on a screen and a printed one.
| Photrio.com contains affiliate links to products. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links. To read our full affiliate disclosure statement please click Here. |
PHOTRIO PARTNERS EQUALLY FUNDING OUR COMMUNITY:  |
