Somebody posted somewhere (that’s how we say “I heard on the street” in 2015) about the paradox of needing to physically print your digital photographs if you want to have any hope of saving them for posterity. The argument rested on the unreliability of digital media — magnetic hard drives break down or become obsolete, that kind of thing.
Now, I’m old enough to have worked in a darkroom making photographs the old-fashioned way and I love me a good gelatin print. I treasure the photos my family has handed down, including some from the 19th century. But the real threat to future generations’ ability to enjoy our pictures comes not from technological change, to which there will always be a technological fix, but from an entirely different problem: image overload on a proliferation of platforms.
As many of my friends have noticed, I have two small kids. Like many little kids, I daresay they’re kinda cute, and our friends and relatives are endlessly snapping pics and short videos of them on their smartphones. Where do these images go? Dropped into an iPhone message, tweeted out to the wide world, uploaded to a Dropbox folder or saved on somebody’s not-smart-enough phone for retrieval someday (or never). Doesn’t really matter. The images definitely aren’t being lost, but neither are they being gathered, curated, tagged, indexed and otherwise made findable by their two-year-old subjects 20 years from now. So in other words, they are being lost.
Who in today’s world makes the time to assemble even a 10 Best Pics of Me in 2014 collection to store in an archive – digital or physical? We have so much technology for making and storing images, and it is so good, that pictures become ubiquitous and ephemeral. We let them go. Lost a picture? Take another. I dread my children asking me when they grow up: “Daddy, what did I look like when I was small?” I may have very little left to show them, because it will all have slipped away.
The enemy of photographic keepsakes is not the failure of our technology, but its success.
So, don’t worry so much about your aging hard drive. It’s 2015, we have the cloud now anyway. But do find a little time — make it a new year’s resolution — print yourself out a little photo album at the drugstore kiosk and put it in a safe place.
matthewhealey 