The end of "Photography" as we know it?

Edward Felcher said:
The idea of permanence (or that most people's images are worth preserving), is ludicrous.
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Indeed.
And we've lost more important artefacts due to stupidity, laziness, carelessness, ignorance, wars, natural disasters, etc than we care to remember. Did it make us less of a human being? No, it didn't. People and events are lucky to be remembered for more than a few generations, and that's quite OK. Why dwell in the past when the present is much more important? And don't say we can learn from the past. Human history shows that no event is the same, not now not ever, and that we never learn from mistakes made in the past. And forgetting is part of being human too.

If my photos get lost (negs burned in a fire, files lost in a HDD crash) I'll be devastated... for a while. Then I'll pick up where I left off. Being forced to deal with a clean slate is often a good moment to reconsider your ways, your methods and reasons. You're forced to remember what you did, how you did it, instead of not thinking about such things because you can browse the same old photos over and over again.
 
antiquark said:
There's a big difference between you deciding to trash your pics vs a faulty hard drive deciding for you.

How many times have you heard people agonizing about their photo albums lost in a fire or flood? Lots.
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And there's nothing you can do about it. So, either you pick up your life and get on with it; or you dwell on what you lost, try (and usually fail) to get back what you lost, and work yourself into a depression.

Did Capa gnash his teeth for long when he heard his precious D-Day shots were mostly destroyed? I don't think so.

Did August Sander dwell on the 10s of thousands of negs he lost during and after WW2? No, he used what he had left and made the most of it.

And on and on and on.

Life's too short to stand still at such losses for long.
 
I own a lot of others peoples snapshots from those antique store bins. Some are quite beautiful in their own right. And yes those color prints from my early years are faded. But my idea here is that despite anyone's best intentions images and text stored in a non-physical form seems to me to be vulnerable in ways we can't imagine. I'm just not willing to take the gamble with the images I'm making of my kids. Again, I'm quite willing to be considered some weird old technophobe, but so what if I'm using a medium that I find to be more permanent. I feel an obligation to make the images in the best way I can. What my desendents decide to do with them is out of my hands. Should a few images end up on someone elses wall like the ones I've collected I'll be flattered in my grave.
 
Did Capa gnash his teeth for long when he heard his precious D-Day shots were mostly destroyed? I don't think so.
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He was deeply annoyed. LIFE magazine's original captions said the DDay images were "slightly out of focus" and didn't blame faulty lab work. Capa later titled his memoirs "Slightly out of Focus" -- which showed he did have a good sense of humor.
 
Can't say that film isn't vulnerable to being ruined- but in all my years running films and printing I've only destroyed one roll (poured in stock stop bath), and can count on one hand the number of negatives or slides I've damaged through poor handling- but in the much shorter time I've been using computers (and backing up) I've lost a lot of stuff either from software becoming obsolete, back-up disks losing their data or for no apparent reason. Granted I don't rush out and spend the hundreds of dollars for every new version or get the latest computer model and transfer data over, so I suppose it's my own fault from a tech viewpoint. But film hasn't let me down yet through any fault but my own stupidity, and I shot the same couple of cameras for nearly twenty years. Those are now gone, but the films I shot then are as printable as the film I shot this morning. Can't open my resume from 20 years ago.
 
VinceC said:
He was deeply annoyed. LIFE magazine's original captions said the DDay images were "slightly out of focus" and didn't blame faulty lab work. Capa later titled his memoirs "Slightly out of Focus" -- which showed he did have a good sense of humor.
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The editor(?) was a life long friend and made up for it all in more than one way. Yes, Capa was deeply annoyed but he didn't allow it to get on top of him. He went on to shoot more, and more. And that he got over the loss of those photos is, as you show, very well illustrated by the title of his WW2 "memoirs". If he can overcome the loss of such precious and dearly paid for photos, I reckon we all can overcome the (accidental or deliberate) loss of ours. Nothing lasts forever. Sometimes, though, the end comes a little earlier than expected. :)
 
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