The years of 2000-2020 will be the lost generation of photographs

<p>I'm a professional wedding photographer, I love my work and what I am doing; helping people preserve their memories from a day that marks itself.<br>

I went to school for a degree in fine arts photography, learning how to develop and print images meant to be art, meant to be framed, meant to be seen.<br>

Recently I met with a bride whose mother said something that made me realize there is a coming blank slate in human experience...dramatic, but perhaps very true.</p>

<p>She pointed out that with so many people, particularly the younger ones, using only digital cameras/phones/etc to capture any moment, they have no experience of printing the pictures to be viewed, only a screen saver or a social networking page.</p>

<p>When their computers, cameras, phones or blackberries do what they ultimately must-break down, generations of images will be lost, gone without a way to get them back.</p>

<p>Of course we tell people to back up things, but so often they back these moments to other mechanical or digital devices (i.e. an external hard drive) which will also break down. As a professional I back things up in triple, and with a DVD physical hard copy, but even these will be one day...land fill. Is the future of the past to be in storing things online? or can anyone foresee a way to stave off the loss of so much from so many?</p>

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<p>I don't know if you're aware of MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc., but there seem to be a couple of photos posted on those sites. They may not be printed in the traditional form, but technology seems to be changing. And the dates in the title are a wee bit arbitrary. I don't mean to be a jerk, but really? JR</p>

<p>My feeling is also that the theme in the OP is just a failure to understand and adapt to changes that technology is making in our lives. I think that time period will be viewed as the beginning of an absolute glut of images unlike anything in history. </p>

<p>Everything is being photographed, everywhere, all the time, and the internet is where it is being stored. Personal pictures may get lost if they are not "cared for", but that has always been the case.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Also, how many prints and negs are stuffed into shoeboxes and shoved into closets, never to be seen again until the person dies and the non-valuables are thrown out?</p>

<p>Just a repeat in the history of the snapshot.</p>

<p>As many teenagers who have posted nude photos of themselves on the web have, or will soon, discover, once something is on the internet there is almost always some backup or other where it will persist.</p>

<p>When the Society of St. Pious recently tried to pull their more-or-less antisemitic web pages there were still lots of copies both held privately and in things such as cached files even on Google.</p>

<p>In the film days, the third generation often just threw out all the old photos and negatives, not knowing who they were. Sometimes I get lucky and find some of them in antique stores, too, but not any longer in the hands of anyone who remembers who Uncle Bob was, just a pencil marking on the back of the print.</p>

<p>So I am not so sure about any more "gap" than there was when paper was the medium. Even now, these words will probably be winging their way to Alpha Centauri through some kind of wireless connection.</p>

<p>"Is the future of the past to be in storing things online?"</p>

<p>No, but its present is.</p>

 

<p >Negatives and prints are just as fragile as a hard drive. Not stored correctly and they will be gone in a short amount of time.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Its true that many people have no clue how close they are to disaster with their digital media. I had a fire nearly wipe out 3 or 4 generations of photos. Negatives and prints are actually harder to back up in my opinion. I am trying to scan them, yep digitize them so they will no longer be lost due to age and easier to share.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Images of our past will only survive if the people charged with their care will take the steps to preserve them, regardless of the medium.</p>

<p > Jason</p>

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<p>She pointed out that with so many people, particularly the younger ones, using only digital cameras/phones/etc to capture any moment, they have no experience of printing the pictures to be viewed, only a screen saver or a social networking page.</p>

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<p>Now is the time that you don't need to print to show off your photos. Places like Photo.net, Pbase, Flickr, Myspace, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa are the media. These online communities are not going to crash anytime soon. Don't underestimate young people, they have more back ups then you ever do, they probably have one in their Iphones, one in their Ipods, one in their computers, one in their laptops, one on their picasa pages, one on their social networking pages and many girls still print for their scrapbooking projects. We live in the internet age, people share everything, especially young people. So don't think they're just a bunch of kids with digital cameras.</p>

<p>I like to see prints framed too and I don't store my photos online (CDs & DVDs), but I like surfing online communities and viewing images also. I really think we have the best of both through technology. I don't worry about my photos being preserved when I check out, I just want to enjoy them now!</p>

<p>I have a shameful secret other life as a scientist with a particular interest in data storage, which pulls me down halfway between Daniel and the most of the replies to him.<br>

Material in off line stores is extremely vulnerable, whether photographic or of any other type. Not just to eventual failure of the medium itself, but also to rapid developmental obsolescence (<a href="http://sammysdot.blogspot.com/2008/11/fistful-of-rosetta-stones.html">for example</a> ).<br>

Online material is, as several respondents above have pointed out, safe – as long as the internet or its successors maintain a continuous existence and as long as the file formats remain readable. The readability issue looks set to be less and less of a problem, but early digital formats may well become difficult. The continued existence of the internet or its successors seems certain unless we hit a massive and globally catastrophic disaster.<br>

There will no doubt be much material lost (as there always has been, from cave painting through to silver/film/paper) because it was only on offline storage; but much will also survive, because it is online, and in much greater volume than before. There may, however, be a gap for digital material created (ie, in this case, photographs exposed) before large scale free online storage became an everyday reality – though that will also ovelap with film and paper still being commonplace.<br>

The remaining case is the hypothetical fall (or damage back to a pre internet state) of our whole global society. If something (pick your own favourite disaster: asteroid, nuclear war, massive water or food shortages, Vogon constructor ships, the hypothesised La Palma wave) were to so cripple us that maintenance of the internet became an expensive luxury, paper snapshots from the silver century would again outlive newer digital or ink printed images.</p>

<p>Even if what you say would be true Daniel for the most part it wouldn't be a great loss. It's not like they are all producing great art is it?<br>

<em><br /> </em><br>

<em>"...but even these will be one day...land fill"</em></p>

<p>actually I find that a very comforting thought myself. It's the nature of things.</p>

<p>I'm sure this post just reflects a lack of appreciation of how people - and particularly young people- prefer to communicate and share images these days these days. Even so I'd expect that the likes of Epson, Canon, not to mention the online print sources and the in-store minilabs operated by store staff or customers might take a view that the death of the print is a little premature.</p>

<p>My memories of photographs before digital came along are not largely of the beautifully made framed prints emanating from a studio. More it is of faded, poorly composed 6x4 prints from a stores lab or mail order business, sitting in cheap frames on a chest of drawers until long after there was any quality in their survival; a storage problem from piles of yellow envelopes, and never being able to find a particular photograph because the "filing system" was inadequate. Survival of these images is I guess a technical possibilty but I doubt whether it was ever a practical "given". My parents, and I'm sure others, used to throw away the negs since they already had their prints; and the prospect of doing shots again to make images worth keeping (as one can do today) was never an issue due to film and processing cost and the fact you didn't find out about inadequacies until the occasion/location was well past. So I guess I'm debating both the practical fact of survival and the quality of what survived. I think the "survival gap" hypothesised by the OP is not real and that inevitable technical failures aside, as many or more quality images from this generation will survive in a practically accessible and usable form. </p>

<p>Finally let me say that there's more to the enjoyment of photography than survival alone. The power to instantly share and publish , and to view photographs at leisure on a computer screen instead of crouching round the yellow envelopes, has a great utility IMO. So has the fact that its easier for the user to make and print a quality photograph nowadays without needing to use a studio to get it.</p>

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<p>Don't underestimate young people, they have more back ups then you ever do</p>

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<p>Absolutely true but many have only low res versions left. It takes a while to realize that you need much larger image for a good print than on screen.<br>

Then again is that better or worse than having a faded hastily done minilab 4x6. Or a color neg that has turned into awful mess. Besided there's nothing inherently wrong about viewing images only on computer screen. And of course LCD photoscreens that run slide show are actually very nice and it's much easier to make images look good and bright on screen compared to printing. Backlit media takes away (most) issues with paper, printer and ink quality, brightness range, room lighting, metamerism, mysterious cropping, resolution...</p>

 

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<p>as long as the internet or its successors maintain a continuous existence and as long as the file formats remain readable. The readability issue looks set to be less and less of a problem, but early digital formats may well become difficult. The continued existence of the internet or its successors seems certain unless we hit a massive and globally catastrophic disaster.</p>

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<p>Yep, it's impossible to take out the net without full scale war or massive meteor strike etc.<br>

File formats are not that difficult, there are tools to read pretty much everything, just harder to obtain than normal stuff and hardware may need custom solutions. My friend has a cd-rom drive on his C-64, remember that little 1MHz box? :)</p>

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<p>years of 2000-2020 will be the lost generation</p>

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<p>What's going to happen in 2020?</p>

<p>This is a yes and no answer. My father saved everything, I have all his pictures from WWII and and before. My mother has photo albums with several previous generations of my family including a tintype of some sort. I have almost every negative or slide since I started shooting in 1969. And of course I have multiple copies of all digital files since 2003.<br /> My kids have only shot digital point and shoot , but their all saved. Not thanks to them, but because we have a home server that is backed up by me.<br /> My son while at college has taken a lot of photos for memories. He's a junior. When he went off to school. the 1st thing I did was buy him a external HD f to back up his laptop to.<br /> Last month the Hard Disk in his laptop went bad. No problem I thought. Had a new drive overnighted to him, and one of his friends installed it and restored his laptop. He just got home for the summer. When I asked him about the laptop he said it was fine, but he lost all of his photo and videos since he didn't copy them to the external drive. Only had all his school work backed up.<br /> Yes I think about half the people will have some sort of backup of their digital files. Helps that most photo processors include a CD for those who have prints made.<br /> But there will be a large number of photos lost by everyday shoots due to data disasters and the such. A lot of folks just dont backup their data and lose it. The will be people in 20 years with no baby photos of themselves.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>"Is the future of the past to be in storing things online?"</p>

<p>No, but its present is.</p>

 

<p><strong>Felix</strong> :</p>

<p>'sammysdot' Gotta love it! :)</p>

<p><em>When he went off to school. the 1st thing I did was buy him a external HD f to back up his laptop to... ...but he lost all of his photo and videos since he didn't copy them to the external drive.</em></p>

<p>If you are paying for his college, I hope that investment works out better.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>If anything, there are too many photographs being created, and the vast majority will sit around hogging storage space and creating carbon dioxide due to the power needs.<br>

Photographs have turned from artistic creations to a commodity. That's probably the real reason why there's such downward pressure on the fees that photographers have been able to charge.</p>

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<p>What's going to happen in 2020?</p>

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<p>Bueh, that's when John Connor dies and the Resistance loses.</p>

<p >"Photographs have turned from artistic creations to a commodity."</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Seems to me that it is no different from the time the first Brownie hit the market. It is very true that the digital age has brought with it a negative effect on the dollar value applied to professionally created images. But I don't think its due to a change in peoples view of photography. I don't think (just my observations here) the general public views photos as "artistic creations", despite that is what many of them are.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >I know my wife would not know a finely created and expressive work of art in the form of a photograph if it sat in her lap. But she knows a "pretty" picture when she sees it and dear Lord don't let the subject not be centered and it better be bright and colorful. Aint that a shame...</p>

<p > </p>

<p >As was hashed out in another post, people care for the subject matter and the moment captured more so than the quality of the image or print. </p>

<p > </p>

<p >I know there are more dynamics involved but I think a big part of the equation is not just that any one can take photos now with digi cams (as I said, that has not changed since the Brownie), but that they can do it with no further investment beyond the purchase of the camera. No film to buy or processing. Also with the feedom to take thousands of images with no resulting cost, they are likely to get a handful of OK to Good shots. As they say, even a blind hog can find an acorn every now and then.</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Bottom line in my view...People who would have viewed and valued photographic works as art and creative empression, still do and always will. Those that don't....never will. Unless they are taught…I am working on the wife, we have made some progress. The subject no longer has to be centered, sometimes. :o)</p>

<p > </p>

<p >Jason</p>

<p > </p>

<p>It may well be that over the next few years there will be a glut of images - on Facebook, and who knows how many photo album sites, CDs, DVDs hard drives and flash drives and storage devices yet to be invented. But in 100 years, assuming these images are still accessable (that's a big if) will anyone be able to identify them? Will anyone care? I've seen countless images in antique shops and other places with nothing to identify who the people were or when the photo was taken. There have to be people out there who would love to have these old photos of their relatives. </p>

<p>My point is that if people don't take a greater interest in preseving their images, identifying them, and ensuring they are passed down, the storage media they are on doesn't much matter.</p>

<p>more on my son's lost photos - he has about 1/3 of them since they were up on Facebook. Interesting how that plays into this discussion.</p>

<p>"The trouble with digital photography is that there is too much of it," said by noted photographer, Jack Dykinga, quoting someone else.<br>

Eric</p>

 

<p>i think that I have a view closer to that of Scott and Daniel. On the subject of lost photos my fear is that we will lose lots due to software compatibility issues. despite promises to support all formats the history of the IT industry in this respect is very poor. Thus I expect that as generations of software format change many people will not convert their images as they become obsolete and they will ultimately get lost. I have similar parallels with work that I have backed up over the last 20 years. The only way I can access much of the stuff I saved digitally (5.25 and 3.5 inch disks in Lotus123, Wang, Xerox, Lotus suite etc...) is to use the paper copies of key documents I saved and have them re-typed! I suspect that many photographs will go the same way as JPEg gives way to newer standards.</p>

<p>On the issue of digital creating too many low quality images I tend to agree. I live on the edge of Banff National park in Canada and you will be amazed at the changes digital has brought to images. People take 10 shots where they once took one and they are much less careful with the composition than they were when they associated a real processing cost with each image. Don't get me wrong digital has made better quality images easier to take for almost everyone but zooms and the assumption that each image is free appears to have led to large quantities of low quality images.</p>