> On 4 Feb 2014, at 19:05, Bill <[email protected]> wrote: > >> On 04/02/2014 12:06 PM, Bob Sullivan wrote: >> [...] > Perhaps I'm a bit of a heretic, but really, most pictures are almost always > of little more than passing interest, even to the person who took them, are > generally boring, and are not worthy of any preservation efforts whatsoever. > With the pox on photography that is the digital era, preserving everything > captured by a sensor diminishes anything captured by a sensor, and > considering how little importance even the most important images have, pretty > much every image is valueless. > Most people seem to realize this, and treat their pictures for what they are, > which is digital ephemera, to be kept until it is unhandy to store them, and > then send them to the digital version of hell to be thankfully forgotten.
In the long run, as someone once said, we're all dead. Then everything is valueless. While it's certainly true that the overwhelming majority of pictures have no value beyond their immediate use, it is a bit of a stretch to suggest that therefore they are all valueless. At any given time in history, and pre-history, far more pictures, or works of art by whatever definition anyone chooses, are made than will ever survive, and most of them are crap, at all times. This is an important thing for people to remember when they are staring baffled at something in a gallery - it probably is exactly as crap and meaningless as you think it is; perhaps more so, because you probably know so little about art you don't even know how shit most of it is. Works that survive do so for 2 reasons. 1. Enough people think it has enough value to be worth preserving. Leonardo's work is a uncontroversial example; HCB's is another 2. It gets lucky, and outlives most if its contemporary crap, so that rarity gives it value and people invest in actively preserving it. Prehistoric cave paintings are an example; E J Belloc's photos are another. In the first instance, someone has to think it's at least worth giving the next person in the chain the opportunity of assessing its value for themselves. In the second, if we as humble photographers don't at least give our progeny a fighting chance, they will never outlive the rest of the crap, and we will never be posthumously famous. So I say, edit well and look after your back-ups; immortality will look after itself. B -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
