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Do Digital Photos Endanger History?
Ant writes "Experienced photographer Jayne West wrote her degree dissertation on the
historical impact of digital capture. She
argues that the use of digital photography in
news reporting means we could lose a
valuable pictorial record of history." Much of her argument seems weak to me (precisely because digital photography allows the instant culling West talks about). The digital storage itself, though, perhaps ought to make us nervous.
Cave painting, on the other hand, lasts at least tens of thousands of years, so if you REALLY want to preserve your history, I suggest you find a cave and paint in it with some yaks blood.
Or silkscreen using oxide pigments on to fiberglass cloth, and fire it to diffuse the oxides into the silica.
This will be as durable as any other form of quartz as far as fire, cold, water, and chemical attack are concerned, and would be reasonably resistant to physical wear if it was treated with respect.
A raging inferno would still melt the glass. A hot fire would cause the pigments on adjacent pages in a glass-cloth book to blend into each other, too. You can reduce this problem by using corundum fibers (aluminum oxide) and oxides that don't diffuse very quickly. This would take sustained forge-fire to destroy (corundum melts at over 2000 degrees centigrade, and is harder *and* more resistant to chemical attack than quartz).
I've been meaning to test this with a blowtorch, a patch of fiberglass fabric, and some rust powder for a while now. They're all about 30 feet from me; I just haven't bothered yet.
Problems are drawing/writing resolution, lack of a really nice range of pigment colours, and (for corundum) producing the cloth (corundum is a lot harder to spin into fibers than glass; I'm told that it doesn't go through the same "mushy" stage glass does).
I saw a TV report with a traditional photographer who came up with one of the few photos of Clinton and Lewinsky together. When the story broke, he went to his archive of contact sheets looking for glimpses of her with him at various irrelevent white house events.
The digital photographers who had the same irrelevent pictures from the same events had "saved space" or "reduced clutter" by deleting photos that were irrelevent at the time, but much sought after later.
Depending on your personal politics, additional photos of them may still have been irrelevent at any time, but it demonstrates the loss of a full historical record that goes along with recording "historical" images on transient media.
how many photographs have ever been made?
how many of them have ever been seen by more than a hundred people?
how many would be considered to be a part of the historical record?
culling is a natural phenomenon in any field - people may become famous for a while, but over time plenty are forgotten; it's just a function of time. strong images survive, and some become famously known, but how many artists of any kind are known for the work that didn't make the cut? (west's argument says, in part, that we're losing this link to the past because we lose incidental shots - images of a newsworthy event, say, that may not be published, but that show more sometimes than those that become famous.)
how many of those photographs that didn't make the grade are known to the general public? how many are known even in academic circles? more to the point, how many times has a popularly-known image been supplanted by a more historically-relevant image later? (because, says west, we're losing images that may turn out to be more interesting later on.)
to ask a better question, how often has something really important or interesting or useful been supplanted by something mundane or useless or vapid? (in photographic terms, think walker evans vs. anne geddes.) if it were up to me, i'd have less vapid stuff, so that the historical context for important photography would matter more, but the real historical record we're leaving is not the 90% of photographers' negatives that are never printed, it's the 1% of the successes that are remembered. well, that and boy bands.
every good
While I agree the data storage is an important thing to remember, optical photos are just as easily destroyed.
what I think is interesting in the use of digital photos is not that there taking over but that they are so easily edited. While admittely editing a optical photo isn't that hard now we all admit that a digital photo can be done by anyone. Clicking that Ex-boyfriend/girlfriend out of the picture has never been easier.
imho
- Distracting
- Only in some shots
- And deceitful
it was also poorly done. The artists made an effort to "rough up" the banner to make it match the video taped shots but it was quite obviously faked. Fox's "laser puck" experiment with the NHL was more real.
Further, any time a future generation wants to watch my taped version of the World Series, they will have to contend with looking at something that brings about the "what were they thinking" factor. Heaven forbid years from now, when some archeologist digs up a VHS player (just watched Cowboy Bebop earlier this week -- forgive me) and the viewer actually thinks the banner was real.
This started in earnest with the millenium celebrations, but I'm more disturbed by this beginning to affect everyday sporting events. What's next? On my way into work, billboards "Gatored" with multiple layers of holigrammed video?
See what I mean? You don't edit 35mm film, because there's absolutely no benefit (unless it's that one of you with the sheep or something.) Once you've shot the frame, you keep it, because it's more trouble to cut it out and discard it then it is to hang on to it. You can't reuse it, so you retain it. You might toss a whole roll, but not any specific frame.
Digital media might encourage you to shoot more, just as 35mm Leicas encouraged more frames than 4x5 Speed Graphics (and strobes vs. those insanely hot flashbulbs -- those guys must have had asbestos pockets, or just left a trail of fused glass everywhere they went), but they also encourage editing and discard. Hell, you can see it mentioned in the advertising for digital cameras.
There is a coment somewhere in this discussion that suggested little CD-R's. That would probably cover both ends of the problem.
This next song is very sad. Please clap along. -- Robin Zander
except if it's for a graduate degree it's for one in fine arts, not computer science or social sciences... so if you were defending your pro-digital dissertation, unless it was for an MFA in graphic design, you'd be challgenged with her arguments, and people with the same opinions (and biases) would be giving the thumbs-up/thumbs-down.
it might be too charitable to say she's playing to her audience, as she probably deeply believes what she says... but that's the conventional wisdom on the south end of campus either way
One might ask the same about birds. What ARE birds? We just don't know.
One example, as related to me by John Shaw, a well known nature photographer.
The well-known shot of Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton hugging at some convention? I think it was captured on video as well. But the one (out of dozens) of still photographers that caught it, and the one that had their picture published all over the world? It was shot on film. All the other press photographers in attendance at that event were shooting digital cameras (digital is now quite prevelant in photojournalism, in large part because of the short turn around time for processing and transmission, but also because quality doesn't matter nearly as much as timeliness). At the time, Monica Lewinsky was a nobody, one of dozens of White House interns.
All the photographers shooting with digital thought: "ah, a nothing shot" and deleted it. When the story broke and the shit hit the fan, who was the one still photographer who had a shot of this? The one shooting on film.
As a nature photographer, digital isn't there yet. Never mind the resolution, etc., but if you're in the jungles of Borneo, or amongst the penguins in Antarctica, or wherever for an extended period, it's still a heck of a lot easier to schlep a bunch of film than a bunch of memory cards, and to know that it will more or less stand up to the conditions.
Many professional photographers have more than one camera body, sometimes for different films, but mostly for backup. If you're on an important shoot, you need backup. If you're shooting with a film camera, that's easy. If you're shooting with digital, that means some way of backing up your memory cards. Which generally means a laptop. Which if you're serious and/or off the beaten path, means you take a backup for it, too. Starting to get the picture?
I'm not saying that digital photography is the problem behind of all this. But the number of photographs that on film that are viewable now from 100 years ago, vs. the number that are shot on digital and will be viewable 100 years from now is probably not comparable. If you find a trunk of old photos from 100 years ago, you'll probably at least go through it once. If you find an old CD 100 years from now, you might think "huh! How quaint! It's like one of those old 45s my grandpa talked about". And those photos will probably never be seen again.
I once heard an interview with a media photographer who became famous when the Monica Lewinski scandle broke because he had a picture of Bill hugging Monica at some event a few months before the "news" broke. He commented that 100 other photographers took that same picture, but since she was an unknown and uninteresting person they all deleted the photograph from their hard drives. This photographer was shooting slides, and was able to go back through his old shots and find a picture that was initially believed to be a non-event. BTW, he made lots of $$$ from that shot.
Mind you, I just switched from slides to digital myself...but if you are a journalist photographer there is a lesson to be learned here.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
She had a valid opinion 3 years ago, but not now.
About a year ago, I stopped shooting film when I purchased a Canon D30 digital SLR body. Since then I have shot close to 20,000 images. I have -ALL- of them, and I have *NEVER* deleted an image off my IBM Microdrive, even when on the road for weeks at a time. This person probably does not own or work with the latest storage and camera technologies.
Here's how it works:
When I bought the D30 I also bought the IBM 1GB Microdrive. At Fine quality JPEG setting, the microdrive will hold about 800 photos, or more if they have large areas of undetailed sky or backdrop. I went to Japan and England this year. In both places, I shot between 200 and 400 images PER DAY. When I got back to the hotel/motel each night, I pulled out my laptop and dumped all the days' images onto the laptop and erased them off the Microdrive. After I got home I transferred them to my personal computer, where they now live. If I need more room I buy a new hard drive. We all know how cheap they are. Backups are also performed on removable hard drives and stored offsite. I don't use most of those images, but I am always coming back to them and finding more things. 20 years from now I will be laughing at the old cars and bad 90's fashion and will find interesting details in the most mundane of photos. Or perhaps many of the places I have shot will be destroyed by a world war. Who knows?
Lets say you are doing images for large blow-ups or profiled printing and you need to make sure you have no artifacts and a full color gamut. So you shoot in RAW or TIFF format. The microdrive will hold 1/3 of the photos than in JPEG format. Solution? Buy one or two more microdrives, and you still have enough to shoot like a madman in the course of a day. I am not sure what this person is trying to get at. Any lack of space can only be due to not being able to afford flashcards or microdrives.
Also, many other people have already covered the fact that digital photos, when transfered properly across mediums to ensure readability, don't degrade over time, unlike film, and are infinitely more accessable and searchable. I agree with some others here that it is a very luddite opinion to have. There are definitely precautions that must be taken with digital files to be sure they will last (backups, etc) and in the end they will long outlast film.
---Mike
(see my Britain travelogue and photos here.)
of sorts (I majored in history in university) personally I think an artifact like a physical photograph, a positive (slide), or a negative is far more valuable as long as it does exist - consider for a second say if some paiting was made a thousand years ago digitally, and today the equipment didn't exist to display or print this paiting today? Or consider it used some arcane encryption system (like css) that no-one knew how to decode - what would you do? It would be like having a foriegn language with the possibility of not being able to decode it. I'd be willing to bet that 99% of all the photo's and paitings I've looked at in person or in history books were stored in a physical format originally - history books we have today. Of the little original documents we have today how much of this would be availble if it was digital?
CDR's only last a 100 years before they rot, my hard drive in my computer has been repaired twice. How many of you know how to view quantel images (remember the quantel paintbox?), or images from older computers stored in file formats you've never heard of (and yes that computer on your desk in a hundred years will be the equivelent of a C64 or a TRS 80 is now - worse actually).
And then there are electronic texts - luckily I think the library of congress requests 5 copies of each book ever printed - I believe these are physical copies. But just think - could you read an ebook a hundred years from now? Would you know what one was?
On kind of a relavant point - I remember a display at our university library (PSU) and it was entitled something like "a 1000 years of binding books" - there are ways of binding books that are rather good - but have lost their technological edge (or they were too expensive to produce). Computers are the same way - computers 50 years ago are a far cry from what they are today, but how many of us can honestly say we can use pictures or data from those machines right now?
I was a press-photographer for 18 years and the standard practice (certainly on local papers in the UK) was to routinely dispose of all the images shot on a roll of 36exp film apart from the negatives (and a few either side on the roll) of shots chosen to present for publication.
This only practical difference now is that the deleting of image files from a flash RAM card or a drive takes place at the scene in the camera rather than at the office later. (unless newpapers have a procedure that all files are kept regardless - unlikely)
Only time will tell us how archivally permanent digital storage will be.
Anyway, on the last tape of the series, they interview the photographer who took that photo. He is a crusty sort who insists on using real film and scoffs at digital and the story of the picture fixes his argument, he believes.
When the whole Monica-gate thing went down, he remembered seeing her somewhere before. So he hired an assistant to pour over his contact sheets until she found that picture. Which turned out to be pretty important and earned him a pretty penny in the process.
What he wonders is where all the other pictures are? At the same event there were about 50 other photographers taking the same picture at the same time out of the press area. No one else stepped forward before or since. The difference is that all of those photographers use digital almost exclusively and probably cleared off the photo from their hard drives to make way for potentially more "important" pictures.
You have to consider that a professional photographer in that setting may burn through 8 to 10 rolls of film a day. Thats on the order of 240 to 300 high res pictures a day. You may take over 1000 pictures a week. I don't care how big your hard drive is, you're not going to be able to store everything you take digitally. In my mind, she has a point.
The problem is that history gains relevance through context. That context shifts as new information and associations are made. Some "meaningless" photo today could be catching the future's savior or destroyer. You can't make that judgement until some n day in the future.
Final side note... I found the Lewinski photo story funny considering the big deal made about a similar photo of Clinton (as a boy) meeting Kennedy. The relevance had to wait 20 years to show itself.
From the article, I don't think she is necessarily criticizing digital photography itself, but rather the use of the technology.
Cameras come with varying amounts of storage (just like the rolls of film for a traditional camera). We can't blame the technology if the photographer isn't adequately prepared with the right tools and the right amount of storage.
While most professional photographers like to use "professional equipment", I find it odd that many photographers going to digital technology use equipment made for "Joe Consumer". Maybe that should factor into West's criticism.
This is the kind of typical crap argument that infuriates me. Blame the technology, right? Wrong.
Just because you have a new ABILITY does not mean that it should be your practice. If photographers are deleting secondary, seemingly 'unneeded' shots but it is determined that these shots ARE important, then DUH: make the policy NOT TO DELETE THEM. It's not difficult; the metaphor is already there for photographers: when your memory is full, simply snap in a new memory card/cartridge/stick/whatever. Just like film. Don't have enough memory with you? This is equivalent to not having enough film with you, which I'm sure would get a photographer castigated real quick.
The problem is with the process not the technology. If this woman had her way and knew technology, I can see her creating WORM memory for photography. How ass-backwards!
m00.
The biggest problem with photographers using digital media seems to be that they are more likely to delete a photo that will later become important. I know this must happen on occasion, and the instance of Clinton hugging Monica has been brought up.(still not considered of to much importance in my book, but thats another topic) Do people have more examples of this happening? I'd like to see just how often this occurs, and how much could be lost from these pictures being deleted.
To me, the HUGE problem with the advent of digital, and the technology is the ability to fake images. It was very difficult and cumbersome to change images around the film development process. And experienced lab folks could always spot them.
But with digital, you can make all kinds of changes, then make copies, which are basically flawless. Does not bode well for the historic record a few centuries down the road. Technology marches on....
The resolution of something like Fuji Velvia slide film is estimated to be around 30 Megapixels. The Nikon D1X is at the high end of digital cameras for resolution, and it's only around 5 Megapixels.
Digital has a long way to go before it becomes cost-effective for anything other than simple point-and-shoot. If you actually want prints made from your images, you're still going to have to pay for them either having a third party generate them for you, or running your own digital darkroom.
IMO, the predicted demise of film is greatly exaggerated. Film has a lot of life left in it.
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