dinsdag, januari 27, 2004
Digital imaging has been designed mostly by computer geeks steeped in the culture of planned obsolescence rather than archival preservation. Digital files are easily corrupted; many commercial inks and papers currently used for digital printing fade quickly. Photographic files eat up tremendous amounts of hard-drive space. The formats in which we save our images will become unreadable as the technology evolves.
The saddest casualty of digital photography will probably be the family photo album. Snapshots stacked in cardboard boxes, stuck between the pages of books, thumbtacked to the wall, under magnets on the fridge and gathered in photo albums. Now children's pictures are often digital. They're stored on a computer and people hardly ever dig them out for a look.
More than anything, we want our photographs to outlast us. They are artifacts, arbitrary frozen moments that gather potency as images only with the passage of time. Roland Barthes has said that each photograph has a little bit of death in it. We want a record after we're gone.
Professional digital photographers will no doubt find the resources to stay on top of the necessary archival practices, but the amateur will probably be lost.
There's also the lack of a physical object. You can't hold a digital file in your hands the way you can a traditional photograph. Future generations might be less likely to find an old cookie tin of snapshots in their grandmother's attic, tied up with old love letters and dried flowers.
Bron: The Globe and Mail.
The saddest casualty of digital photography will probably be the family photo album. Snapshots stacked in cardboard boxes, stuck between the pages of books, thumbtacked to the wall, under magnets on the fridge and gathered in photo albums. Now children's pictures are often digital. They're stored on a computer and people hardly ever dig them out for a look.
More than anything, we want our photographs to outlast us. They are artifacts, arbitrary frozen moments that gather potency as images only with the passage of time. Roland Barthes has said that each photograph has a little bit of death in it. We want a record after we're gone.
Professional digital photographers will no doubt find the resources to stay on top of the necessary archival practices, but the amateur will probably be lost.
There's also the lack of a physical object. You can't hold a digital file in your hands the way you can a traditional photograph. Future generations might be less likely to find an old cookie tin of snapshots in their grandmother's attic, tied up with old love letters and dried flowers.
Bron: The Globe and Mail.
# posted by Jan-Edward : 13:35
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