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.

Comments

Not cave painting, but a durable approach:

[Christopher Thomas]

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).

Re:Easily solved

[david duncan scott]

True. Let's throw it open to the people: who here has deleted a digital image? And who here has snipped out a particular frame from a roll and thrown it away?

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.

She's right, at least in part

[NaturePhotog]

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.