Archiving Digital Photography

My day began as it often does, with reading the New York Times. The Times had an excellent article on the lost-and-now-found negatives of Robert Capa. Their long journey from Spain to Mexico and now to New York for archiving led me to consider the future of digital photography and how the images of today will be preserved for the future.

With film, distribution and reproduction could be accomplished without the negatives, though until digital retouching, the quality and perhaps the intricacies of the image would erode, leaving an image diminished and false.

With digital photography, however, a series of 1s and 0s can be reproduced forever with no loss of quality. 1s and 0s do not degrade, do not become brittled and yellowed with passing time. Posting one's photographs to the Internet, either to Flickr or a blog, in some ways archives the images for all eternity. The rights of ownership may transfer, perhaps leading to future
precedent- setting court battles concerning publishing rights and residuals, but the photos will not be lost. It will be interesting, and somewhat disheartening, to see different inheriting factions fighting over advertising revenues from blogs and the rights to post and remove photos from Flickr and other media. But from any Website, we can copy files, strings of 1s and 0s that represent artistic vision, and keep them for ourselves. The rights may have been pulled and the photos dropped onto a portable hard drive and stuck in a safe deposit box by their legal guardian, but the images will still exist and will be available should they ever be needed again.

The rise of digital photography has resulted in a surge of amateur photographers. Perhaps, however, this popularity has lead to a dilution of the power of a single photograph or photographer. Today's world-class photographers must exceed the levels of what has been done before in order to capture our increasingly valuable attention. Is photography obsolete in the era of Photoshop and YouTube? I doubt it, but I think the nature of its importance is changing; in some ways becoming more obscure, but in others bringing it to the forefront of our awareness of the world and global interactions.

Our online presences are forever, for right now, and only time will tell how our stories and our images will be presented henceforth.