on 1/20/01 5:54 AM, pentax-discuss-digest at
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> As for lucking into finding very old images that will be interesting in
> the future, it's my understanding that it's mostly the prints that are
> discovered, not negatives
Chris,
True, and that's why I find it so fortunate that early digital prints had no
longevity at all--because print longevity has now become a consumer issue,
and, once a "feature" of an imaging technology becomes a consumer issue, it
tends to stay that way until there's some kind of paradigm shift in the
technology.* So I think it's likely that digital printing technologies are
going to become reasonably permanent (at least, that's been the trend for a
few years now). Since it's the prints that have the best chance of surviving
anyway, this is a useful feature.
But the idea of digital files being "more permanent" than negatives is one I
find laughable. Heck, I have digital files" from 1985 that I can't even
open, because I no longer have the applications I made them with and the
applications I do have don't recognize the files. As to your contention that
"You do need to invest labour in storing [negatives] in as archival a
location as possible," I just don't think that's true. Again, we need to
turn to empiricism. The fact is, black-and-white negatives will survive just
fine in less than ideal conditions--any old notebook, folder, or envelope
will pretty much do the trick. (The fact that people don't have snapshot
negatives isn't technical evidence, it's sociological evidence--it doesn't
prove that negatives don't last physically, it proves that people habitually
threw away their negatives or considered them valueless after prints were
made from them.) It's almost axiomatic that no photographer keeps his or her
archive in very good condition.
One of the funniest stories I've heard along these lines is told by Arnold
Crane, who knew Walker Evans late in Evans's life. Evans was an aesthete,
who dressed in dapper, crisp fashion all his life, and Crane says that his
living quarters were neat as a pin--even random knicknacks placed on a side
table were arranged as artfully as a Japanese garden. Yet Arnold discovered
that there was one area where Evans was not fastidious--negative storage!
His office, desk, and files were in as much a state of carnage as anyone
else's. It was the only area in his house that _wasn't_ neat.
_Most_ photographers don't put very much effort into storing and protecting
their negatives. I'm not saying they leave them lying exposed on the kitchen
floor, but I'd bet your "1 out of 100" figure would be applicable as well to
those who "store their negatives in as archival a location as possible."
In any event, if negatives are ephemeral, digital files are certainly more
so. Raw digital files (the record of a photographer's shooting activity,
similar to a proof book) almost require _curation_...you have to presume
that some one is not only storing them, but monitoring advancing technology
well enough to know when a transfer of media is needed, knows how to do it,
and invests the labor needed to do it EACH TIME IT'S NEEDED. If the digital
files languish for a while and skip a few generations of media storage
technology, they're lost too, because then the applications won't be
accessible that can retrieve the digital information.
In both cases, it's the prints that stand the best chance of surviving
through time, so I believe it's our responsibility to do two things: 1.
lobby for, advocate, and (as consumers) demand printing inks, papers, and
methods that are as archival as possible; and 2. strive to make our own
digital prints using the most permanent technology available.
--Mike
*As an example of this, consider our recent discussion of viewfinder
coverage and magnification--this never became a consumer issue, and so most
consumer cameras have wretched viewfinders that are far below what modern
design is capable of. Shutter lag is another technical parameter that has
never entered the public consciousness. So we have point-and-shoots that may
have 800 ms. shutter lag times, which is ridiculous. Rank tyros notice it
and complain about it, but it's not a selling point--it's not relevant to
marketing--so it's not addressed technically. On the other hand, "fine
grain" and "fast lenses" became consumer issues in photography pretty early
in the last century--mainly during the ascendency of the 35mm format--and
stayed that way until long after those problems had been adequately solved.
In the case of fine-grain film, we still hear about it, even though there
haven't been any truly "grainy" films made for decades now--even P3200 has
what would have been called "fine" grain in the 1950s assuming you know how
to handle the stuff. And the speed of lenses survived as a consumer issue
until the paradigms changed--in this case, until single-focal-length lenses
fell out of popularity among consumers in favor of zooms and
point-and-shoots (or both). (At that point, the old standard of f/2.8 as
"slow" for a single-focal-length lens gave way to a standard of f/2.8 being
"fast" for a zoom. It's still the same old f/2.8, but its meaning changed.)
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