I’ve often toiled over the archivability of digital imagery and even wrote about a close call I had in losing a drive that archived some of my work, A Happy Ending to My Drive Crash. With some regularity I have thoughts revisiting the prospect that it’s just a matter of time before I have to endure this again and deal with the loss of a drive and even worse an irrecoverable loss of a drive. While there are certain precautions you can take to minimize such loss I can’t help but think that digital will always lack permanence.
Proponents of photographic prints are always keen to highlight that paper has been an archivable medium for thousands of years where as digital is a relatively new phenomenon of the last half century. Less electricity digital imagery is locked away on hard drives that then become perfect paper weights. The more I see others immerse themselves in digital photography the more I see society risking the loss of a significant portion of our visual history. Can we really trust digital to always be there? Enter a video short I saw the other day titled “Lost Memories”. It’s worthy of a watch…
LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo.
So now that you’ve seen the video I ask you…. how permanent do you expect your digital imagery to be and what are you doing about it?
Nothing is forever. In the days when “curator” meant more than inventing hashtags, it involved responsibility for the care, interpretation and preservation of art and other objects. If you are a good curator of your own work, the medium is a secondary concern. Curating digital files involves backing them up properly, storing backups off site, and updating the storage media as new technologies become available.
It’s much easier to lose a piece of paper or film than identical digital data stored in multiple locations.
It’s better to have eachother than to have memories anyway. That guy blew it before the lights went out. 😉
Although I do keep back-ups of my digital images, I get the most pleasure from them when they’re printed, either as a standard print, or in a self-published magazine or book.
Broken pipes, flooded basements, mold, mice, the list goes on. Not to mention physical space. Redundant backups, made regularly. I’ve got jpegs from the 90’s.
While no medium lasts forever I do think there are advantages to paper for some people. I agree with Guy Tal’s comment above that if you look after your own photography with a series of backups it can last forever. However, other than some graphic professionals most people do not do this properly or at all. In the days where photography was always printed in some physical form, most people could keep track of the shoe box of prints or the photo albums of their children growing up. Now that this is digitized for most – they do not keep track of it nearly as well. So I do think there is an advantage to printing important images for most people. Some of my friends with young children not only keep their digital copies but print important photos twice, one for home and one to keep at the Grandparents house. It seems much less likely they will lose their memories.
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One day I spilled a whole cup of water on my lap top. For a month I had access to none of my files (and I thought they were gone forever) after my computer magically started working again, I definitely understand and love the idea of paper, hard copies of your work. I feel I respect them more and treasure them…not like their transient, digital sisters.