On Sat, 20 Jan 2001, Mike Johnston wrote:
I took the liberty of marking this "OT".
> This is the standard argument and I don't buy it. You have to think of
> the nature of archival preservation. Many are made, few are preserved.
> The fact is, we don't necessarily know what's going to be considered
> valuable 150 years from now.
This is a very good point and I agree with it. Digital archiving is not
without its flaws at the moment, and the amount of work required to
transfer images from one medium to another is one of them. What I was
pointing out was that--in cases where a particular image is to be
preserved--digital offers the potential for longer storage than film.
As for lucking into finding very old images that will be interesting in
the future, it's my understanding that it's mostly the prints that are
discovered, not negatives. How many people go through all the trouble of
creating a system to link their prints with their negatives? I'm sure
most of us do, but almost no 'average' person that I know of
does. Digital prints will suffice for this once their archival problems
have been resolved, which I'll gladly admit that they haven't been
yet. Bill's analogy of wet-plate works well... just give it time.
> So are you going to transfer _all_ or your images from one
> storage medium to another every time the technology changes? I don't know
> about you, but I'm not even a particularly heavy shooter and I've got 80,000
> negatives. I wouldn't want to have to do the work of proofing them all
> again, much less doing whatever might be necessary to transfer them from one
> digital media to another. I think the myth of "infinite transferability" is
> a shibboleth. It amounts to propaganda. It's literally true, but it's not
> useful because it doesn't take into account how images have been made and
> preserved (and lost) since 1839.
If you don't want to transfer your images from, say, a CD to another
medium, then digital is probably not the ideal storage method for
you. For someone who doesn't mind putting in the extra work, digital will
allow an image to survive past the realistic life of a negative (what is
it for a neg? 100 years? 200?) After that time your negatives will either
be unworkable, or will have been copied (assuming that film still
exists) and the quality degraded. So there's definitely arguments for
both sides.
> A film negative is a write-once storage medium. That's its big
> advantage. You make the negative, and then all you have to do is not
> let it get destroyed (by fire, water, or some other kind of physical
> damage). You never have to invest any more labor in the survival of
> the image it contains.
This is not true. If you leave your negs lying around the house, exposed
to changes in the temperature and humidity, where air can get at them,
they're not going to last too long. You do need to invest labour in
storing them in as archival a location as possible. You're talking about
upkeep, which is a different thing. In that, I agree with you. The
beauty of negs is that you don't have to do anything with them. The down
side is that they will deteriorate with time, and that you only have the
one--if anything happens to it, it's gone. The beauty of digital is that
your images can last indefinitely if you want. The down side is that you
might have to transfer them a few times in your life, and that takes extra
work. Is it worth it? Not for everyone. My point was merely that for
those people who want to take the extra time to maintain a digital image,
it will last longer than a negative can. Not everyone will do this, just
as not everyone will keep their negs, or use SLR's instead of
throw-aways. Different people are willing to put in different degrees of
effort.
> The big assumption everybody seems to make--and that manifestly isn't
> true--is that you'll know which digital images are valuable and worth
> preserving. Oh, you might be right in a couple of instances, in the
> case of acknowledged artists and images which are known to be precious
> right from the moment of their creation. But if you study the history
> of photography, the general rule that emerges is that many pictures
> that were valued when they were made are valueless today, and many
> pictures that were considered worthless when they were made are
> considered valuable today.
Huh? I'm not even arguing that issue. You're correct in that we
won't know which images will be appreciated in the future and which
won't. But here's something to try: go through your parents' photo
albums--all of them--or pick a random person's album from, say, 50 or 60
years ago, and see if there are any negatives there. I think in the
majority of cases they'll have the prints, but not the negs. I know that
at the store where I work the number of people who bring in old photos to
be copied *hugely* outweighs (probably 100:1) the number of people who
have older negatives. I ask the people who just have prints what happened
to the negatives, and the answer is always the same. They're lost, or
destroyed, or didn't make a move, or they just have no idea. And some of
these photos are magnificent, showing Winnipeg in its early years. So
they may not have their original digital files, but they won't have the
negs, either. I'll certainly give the edge currently to chemical printing
for its archival qualities, with the qalification that digital will be
there some day.
> Think of all the zone system photographers making carefully
> archivally-processed and selenium-toned pictures of rocks. Who's going to
> give a rat's ass for a picture of a rock in 150 years? Rocks will still look
> the same. What historians are going to value are pictures of things that
> turned out to be significant with the passage of time--people, things,
> events that will never happen again and can't be revisited or rephotographed
> and that only emerged as being significant later. On digital, not much of
> that is going to survive, because the knoweldge of its significance would
> have to accompany it as it passes down through time, past one "transfer of
> media" after another. The fact is, for the lion's share of images made,
> people either won't care enough or won't expend the effort to preserve them.
Or to keep their negatives, which amounts to the same thing.
> We will lose much more of our history than we did during the film era. Just
> like people are already losing all their color snapshots from the Instamatic
> era onwards.
Yup, it's hard to argue with the fact that society is moving more towards
a disposable culture of the temporary and immediate. Must be why I like
the old metal cameras so much. :)
> Whether you think that's good or bad is a value judgment. But the "fact"
> that digital is "more archival" is only a theoretical truth--it won't be
> true in actual practice, i.e. the way the images are most likely to be
> collected and preserved.
Well, I'll suspend judgment on that. I think it's very possible that
digital technology will make it extremely easy to transfer images in the
future. The cost of storage media is decreasing, just as the maximum size
of the media is increasing, and I'm sure there will be software (if there
isn't already) that will let you copy all of your files just by pressing a
few buttons. And, like Bill said, it's still in its infancy. It's the
whole daguerrotype/negative argument all over again, and we all know how
that turned out once negative technology had a chance to develop itself.
I hope I'm not coming across as a digital fanatic. I try to have an open
mind about this, and I have no problem with recognizing that film has a
lot of advantages over digital at this point. However, I can also see
what digital is capable of in the present, and it will allow many things
that film can not. You takes your pick...
:)
chris
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