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Quote
of the Week:
All solitary dreamers know that they hear differently when they close their eyes.-Gaston Bachelard
Notes on the Digital Legacy
I was pursuing Sarah Pullman's blog this evening, in between watching the Great Escape and baking cookies, and read her thought-provoking article on the legacy of digital imagery. Go read it, if you can. Her thesis questions the future availability of the digital images we make today; will our great-grandchildren be able to see them? And if they can, they will see how intimately our lives were documented, and won't that impact or skew their actual memories of us? All good points. As a comment, I posted the note you see below. It is one of the more relatively lucid things I've written on a topic I've thought about a lot in the last two years or so, ever since I got my digital camera, and have been making about 100 times as many digital images as I have been exposing sheets of film.
Here it is:
As an old-school photographer (big, wooden camera, huge sheets of film, anachronistic dark cloth wrapped around me), who also made over 1200 digital snaps of my new twin girls this year, I can sympathize. I don't expect many of my digital images to survive more than a generation--except those that actually get printed out. The human eye is the ultimate hardware you have to match your technology to, when speaking of visual literacy, so if you want it remembered, print it out. On archival paper. And store it in a dry, dark place.
I would equate all my digital files to the boxes of negatives I keep around. The negatives are only one step removed from the experience that created them. Prints made from these negatives are the carrier wave for the aesthetic, symbolic, and historic meaning that I want to impart. Can you put your hands on your parents' photos' negatives? What about the photographs made by your grandparent, or great-grandparents? I bet, however, that you have at least one image from each of those generations close at hand (or at least a phone call away).
So, here's my advice: Don't worry about the digital legacy that might embarrass your future progeny, because (while it may be hidden on the wayback machine or somewhere else on teh internets) it probably won't get too much exposure in 50 years. Buy a sturdy photo album, print out the photos that really mean something to you, and put them in there. And if you really want to make your great-great-grandkids wonder about you, write some really misleading captions underneath them!
The act of looking at a physical artifact is still one of the most powerful experiences a person can have.
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