Sunday, May 19, 2013

Frame 6


Ephemeral Ephemera, To Be or Not to Be

After you cull through your photographs on the computer, how do you save them? Even though it may seem, from what I’ve written, that I’m still married to film, I probably haven’t shot a roll or sheet in 10 years. As a result, during this past decade, I have begun to deal with and think about my ever-growing and problematic storage issues.  

Storing photographic imagery has become both an issue of space and of time. I have three fireproof file cabinets in my studio. They store all of the negatives, transparencies and prints that I took from, roughly, 1975 to 2001. I have to say, that although I didn’t scrimp on using film, I was more parsimonious than I am now in the number of frames I shoot. Digital capture begs some degree of overindulgence. Even so, one might think that the difference between a file cabinet and a hard drive in terms of physical size is uncontested. A hard drive obviously takes up less room.

With film, storage space wasn’t my first concern; it was a fear of loss through fire or earthquake. Our possessions are ephemeral and loss of all that we own is always a possibility. However, as discussed in Frame 2, we know there is some hope of being reunited with those magical scraps of paper memory. Where there is material existence there is hope.

But digital images have no material existence—Aye, there’s the rub. They are simply electronic avatars of our momentary decisions. They are prone to the thousand natural shocks that any electronic device is heir to: viruses, corruption and crashes. Algorithms that reconstitute the images are contingent on corporations’ willingness to keep them alive. That issue becomes the major factor concerning timing. As consumers, how do we know when it is time to abandon what he have, for what will be? We are in the terrible position of relying on companies to keep financially viable as they integrate past technologies into the creation of some unknowable future photographic product.

Obsolescence has always been a part of photography’s technological evolution and is applicable to every chemical and paper/glass/metal media that photographers have embraced. I think that the main difference is in knowing that the chemicals and substrates that photography has depended on for the past 173 years are still available. They may be used for other things, but the ability to appropriate them to remake photographs is possible. Negatives will always be printable.

By using digital photographic media, we are in the unfortunate position of keeping a step ahead of the devil. What happens when Adobe files bankruptcy (think Kodak) and their RAW processing formats are gone, or your new camera’s software will no longer convert 10-year-old files? Will you make sure that your computer’s OS can still read the format that your files are saved in? How long will JPG and Tiff files be the formats of choice? How many times will we keep having to resave our images onto new hard drives with the latest connectors (think SCSI)? What if we save them on DVDs and computers no longer read DVDs (think floppies and Zip Drives)? Do we have the time or energy to stay current with each technological change or will our enterprises turn awry and thus lose the name of action?

Tell me what you think

Frame 6A
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