jeudi 8 septembre 2005

Are your precious images in a shoe-box, a drawer, an envelope? Abuse them... and you lose them! I missed the intro to Nigel Wrench's interview of photographer Wolfgang Tillmans on the BBC Radio 4 News this evening (around 5:45 pm GMT)... not that it would have mattered, ordinarily, as I don't have any true appreciation of what most modern photographers do, nor why they interpret their style of photography as they do, nor what they try to say.,, even if they have been awarded a Turner Prize as Tillmans was in 2000. The uncomfortable mixture of "deluded cynic" in me just cannot get into tune with how current photography has evolved in the past couple of decades... and that's not even considering film being overtaken by digital in use and popularity and the implications from that shock to my traditionalist way of thinking. But then I think I overheard Tillmans say (the wireless was in another room) that, "Digital was the biggest image destruction machine ever." In one respect I knew what he meant... there have been mutterings in the serious press for some years that with increasing use of digital there is no longer compilation of archives. Simply put, in the old days press photographers' negatives and 10 x 8 "glossies" were kept by newspaper libraries or filed with independent news agencies who had indexed archives going back to the turn of the century... 1900 that is. Nowadays, an image is viewed on the digital camera's LCD and saved to, or wiped from, the memory card. Those that are saved then go through another selection process in the camera maker's proprietary image editing program or PhotoShop... with more being dumped. Admittedly, there are valid reasons for dumping many images, both tactile and electronic - lack of content, technical considerations and duplication being the main ones - but a state of mind has entered the craft where instant capture leads to instant dumping. The acronym GIGO comes to mind... Garbage In, Garbage Out. The exact opposite of this would have been the press photographer of the 1930s who would be sent out to get a shot of, shall we say, the King passing through town in an open carriage... and having one chance with one plate holder to get one shot... the shot. Maybe I'm exaggerating the limitations imposed by the paper's editor... perhaps the photographer had a double-sided film holder for such an important event! But along the line a few years in the 1970s when I was freelancing in Fleet Street for the nationals, the most you were expected to come back with from a job was a 20-exposure roll... 36-exposure rolls were too long and took too long to look at, wouldn't fit on the "strip contacting light-box" in the darkroom, and anyway were too long for a picture editor to hold in outstretched arms in a cramped office. Tillmans also pointed out - and I suspect he has personal experience - that computer hard-disks crash (how many people make back-ups regularly? Very few and very infrequently) and work is thus lost forever. There are also serious concerns over the reliability and longevity of CDs (used by many to store images)... not to mention their compatibility in years to come when the original programs used to "write" the discs have long been obsolete. He finally said that his colour film negatives held the equivalent of 18 megapixels of information whereas prosumer digital cameras today averaged only 8 megapixels. A cathartic process... Last week I was sorting through my black and white negative files and contact sheets to see how many films I could dump prior to the Grand Tour. Well, I got rid of almost half my carefully filed bags of negatives and their accompanying proofs. If you feel nervous at the thought of doing the same yourself, for whatever reason, I can say it's a remarkably cathartic process. It may shock you, though, to know that I threw away close to 5,000 rolls of archived films... that's over 175,000 exposures... most of the first twenty years of my photographic output. I kept a fistful of films which had lovely shots of my children growing up... and a couple of dozen bags of negatives from which I'll print up or scan images for use in future blogs (the Great Dorset Steam Fair above and Widecombe Fair shots were amongst them)... but most of it was crap... personal shots of nothing remotely interesting to anyone any more. What I have just done is the equivalent of a digital dump from the camera's memory card... but in a big way. In fact I have little choice because on our travels storage space will be so limited as to be non-existent - especially for what I can only class as ephemera. I thought hard about it and realised that there was no commercial benefit in keeping such a mass of archived personal material... and will do the same next week (although it will be more difficult with more recent work) with another 5,000 packets of negatives. What I'll be left with will be cherished, valuable and unrepeatable negatives and images kept safely to hand and from which I can extract images and image files for use here (as long as I have readers) and for publishing in the printed media. I calculate that my black and white film archive will occupy no greater space than taken up by a couple of shoe boxes and a few dozen envelopes in a drawer... but what am I saying? That's exactly how my cherished archive will be dissipated, damaged and ultimately, lost. So here's the poop... My film archive will be safe because it will be stored in a modular, expandable album system suitable for long term archival storage of all my black and white negatives, transparencies (which I still have to edit) CDs (both images... and music for the road) plus other collectables from being on the road and kept for "scrapbooking" when a travel-rest is called for. I know which system I'll be using... when I published the photo magazine "Darkroom User" in the UK a few years ago one of the regular advertisers was a growing company by the name of "Arrowfile." I know their product quality, having used some of them for several years, and will choose them again for one reason more than any other... most of their product pages are made from Polypropylene which is a chemically inert substance and completely suitable for long term archival storage of all my film negatives, smaller prints and transparencies. The polypropylene material used has been tested by the Image Permanence Institute in the USA, is totally safe and will last longer than I will... so I'll have no worries about my valuable images in storage "on the road." Incidentally, in recent years I've bought various other slide filing sheets made from plastic... and after a year or two noticed that the plastic of the filing sheets often stuck to both surfaces of the mounted slides rendering them useless. In exceptional cases with slides I couldn't throw away I've spent hours using PhotoShop trying to correct the damage. Never again... life's too short when my intention is to visit many different countries, photograph and write about them. And now[base ']s the time to buy because Arrowfile have a 10% Discount on all products in September! for delivery to anywhere in the world. The Preservation Calculator for Windows PCs How good is your storage environment? How fast is your collection deteriorating? Will mold grow under your current storage conditions? The Preservation Calculator provides instant answers to such questions. It[base ']s a new planning and analysis tool for collecting environments in libraries, archives and museums. Use the Calculator to... Learn how temperature and RH affect organic objects in storage. Evaluate a given storage condition. Compare one storage condition to another. Plan new storage conditions. The Preservation Calculator was created by the Image Permanence Institute at RIT with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation... and is available for download FREE of charge (PCs only). 12:57:31 AM    comment []