After photography
With the advent of smart phones and online sharing. The sheer number of images being captured poses an interesting dilemma, who is going to curate all that imagery and how much of it is transitory and how much should be kept. Just how many pictures is enough to document our lives and who are we documenting them for? The devaluation of pictures was brought home once again on seeing a large garbage bag full of slides at a flea market. An entire life’s photographic work at best to have a few images pulled out that interest those at hand the rest perhaps to be thrown away. This individual must have taken tens of thousands of Kodachrome slides over a lifetime only to have them wind up at an estate sale and then this indignity. I pulled a few out knowing that there was no way for me to go through them all or become the curator of someone else’s photographic oeuvre. These images are a sampling of what I chose but most of the other images I saw were of African safaris but who knows what artistic wonder may have been lurking at the bottom of this bag.
In one way or another this may very well be the fate of most images. Like a cell phone with thousands of images on it set aside and forgotten because the battery no longer works, is that not also a bag of slides on the ground? My daughter was looking through some images on my iPad and came across some amusing selfies she had taken with it, she then turned it towards me and said ‘why do you keep these?’ I should have said because I came from a time when every picture carried meaning. The meaning came from both their relative scarcity and the weight of significance we applied to them. Of course my response was ‘I don’t know’ because I don’t fully know. A further example of the loss of impact of a photo is the rise of Snapchat a social media platform that allows you to send pictures or video to individuals or small groups but has an ephemeral nature. The sent image is deleted after viewing and a predetermined amount of time. Work arounds aside the very notion of deleting an image after it has been seen is a real break from the semi permanence previously ascribed to them. In this case the images aren’t being used to create a document but more often as a way to amuse the recipient at that moment.
Once more photography has changed, fortunately most of the forms and practices that have come before remain so we can choose where in this photographic continuum we fit. For myself I will continue taking pictures with an eye towards documenting the world around me and storing them for some possible future I haven’t anticipated.
Along with these slides were old prints from the 1940’s of someone’s trip to visit glaciers in the Canadian Rockies a poignant argument for the preservation of images, at least some of them.