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Every day, billions upon billions of new images are made; one recent statistic put forth that there were more images made in the last year or two than the entirety of human history before that. It shows, too – in the early days of photography the bar for both content and technical quality was pretty low, given that it was amazing that there was an image at all; these days, there are so many repeats of ‘iconic’ images that they have become cliched and passé. Even though the rise of social media and broadband has enabled content to be consumed at a faster than ever rate, the math only goes one way: the rate of content being generated is increasing faster than the population, and the number of hours per day remains fixed – it is therefore easy to see that either less time is spent viewing a single image, or eventually people will get nothing done except scrolling instagram*. We already know the effect this has had on both the hardware market (positive, then saturated, then people get bored faster) and the professional market (terrible) – so the question I’d like to discuss today is a more fundamental one: what will happen to all of these images in the long term?

*Arguably, this is already happening.

From day one, photography has been the only way to create a permanent record of transient moments: we freeze that passage of time in a way that can be examined at leisure with the focus of attention shifted deliberately to different parts of the image. This is important, because for an event happening directly in front of you, it’s only physically possible to concentrate properly on one small portion at any given time. It means every observer will have a different read on what actually happened depending on their own personal biases and what caught their eye at the time. But – with a photograph, you’re free to notice details that you might otherwise have missed. This is not the case with video, funnily enough: whilst it’s possible to replay and watch different portions of the image, it’s very difficult for us to ignore motion in certain areas only – especially when that motion is of the kind that’s very obvious (color, contrast etc. – the usual rules of subject isolation).

Ironically, the diminished time per image view means that the permanent record has now become very nearly as transient as the event itself: just look at how long an image remains ‘current’ on the average person’s instagram feed. It probably drops off reasonable scrolling distance after no more than an hour or two, and you’re unlikely to be checking the feed multiple times in that duration – the upshot is you see the image once, maybe twice if syndicated to other feeds also. The lifetime of the average digital image, is a few seconds – at best. And that includes capture – the vast majority of which are reflex throwaways from a smartphone.

We of course had the same thing years ago, with 35mm compacts and 1-hour lab processing 6×4” prints – but something about the perceived cost investment and ‘limitedness’ of 36 frames meant those images were looked at more. Even now, probably partially due to the age of the last film images – I know those prints are looked at far more often than our digital archive, despite being in another country and far less accessible. Even somebody very digital-savvy and organized and in the business like myself doesn’t view most images more than a few times; the really strong ones I might revisit a couple of times a year for various reasons, but that’s about it. And that’s for an image created with much care and deliberation by a person who is going about making images as a passion.

It is therefore clear that the vast majority of moments will remain forgotten; there is almost no point in photographing them because even in the minds of the captor they don’t linger. Would fewer images help? Not anymore, because the social media model of consuming content is so ingrained at this point there’s no undoing it. We wouldn’t revisit old images because they’re boring, not new, not satisfying our instant gratification craving. Don’t get me wrong – I’m just as guilty of throwaway images and experiments as the next guy – but I like to think that some of these at least contribute to the process of developing seeing so that the next ‘serious’ image might be stronger. They are the visual equivalent of scales and exercises that I might not show anybody directly, but indirectly manifest when you are working ‘for real’ – and may well make the difference between the right compositional reflexes and the wrong ones.

But even then – what happens to them? In general, they stay on the capture device or disappear into the cloud, to be lost unless you’re a celebrity and your throwaway moment was one of personal indiscretion. Most of the time all of the digital baggage gets automatically migrated to new devices, but there’s also a lot that’s lost forever though a lack of backups, hardware failures, forgetfulness, or simple disorganization. Some images are only remembered by their creators when they are lost; usually for events of significance where the event is remembered first before the image itself (“little Timmy’s first steps”) – usually followed by the lament of “ah, there was a photo/video but I can’t find it” which has since replaced the “if only we had a photo of _”.

The vast majority of images simply aren’t going to be missed, much less remembered, simply because the subject matter is not memorable to begin with – and that threshold of ‘what makes memorable’ is only going to continue to rise as a function of simple statistics as more images are made. Exceptional images are going to enjoy disproportionate viewership anyway as they get circulated through the bowels of social media; what won’t enjoy the same exposure is inevitably the creator, whose name gets separated from the content fairly early on. The reality is there is almost no way to trace ownership and origination, much less prove it; in the majority of cases it is he who shouts the loudest has the strongest claim to attribution**.

**I strongly believe that it the best method of copyright enforcement at the moment is to be both publicly visible and publicly associated; if the image is almost always seen with your byline or watermark, it’s going to be difficult to pass it off as somebody else’s work.

Though most of the digital access issue can be remedied by physical copies – i.e. prints – there are a whole host of issues with physical media that aren’t present with digital. Firstly, physical copies are subject to entropy and degradation in a way that properly maintained digital archives are not; secondly, you can physically lose them and there’s no easy way to comb a stack of papers for a print of an image that was produced on a certain date. If you can’t find something, you can’t view it. The two main things prints do is a) subconsciously force you to invest time into viewing something you’ve invested time and effort into curating and producing, and b) through that viewing time, reinforce your memory of the image. Beyond that – negatives, prints, books – need just as much if not more care than digital.

The argument that file formats may become unreadable is a non-starter, too. Firstly, the most common image format – the jpeg – is highly unlikely to lose support anytime soon by the simple fact of proliferation. There are too many images in jpeg for any new platform or software not to support it. On top of that, one of the key success factors for any software adoption – especially in the current age of mature ecosystems – is legacy support. It’s very, very difficult to convince somebody to switch workflows or platforms when you have to completely start over. And if you’re really paranoid, you can always use tools like Adobe’s DNG converter to turn your proprietary files into an open format. I’ve personally always found this to be a bit pointless though as you can’t save full edits to the original camera raw format anyway; even basic edits aren’t viewable without dedicated software – so I’ve always needed a ‘finished’ version as a tiff or jpeg anyway.

I actually don’t think we need to worry too much about what will happen to significant (read: unusual, important, interesting) images within the lifetime of the original creator. There’s enough secondary life beyond the creator that they will be remembered. What is less certain is what will be left behind after the current generation passes – we are the first generation who will leave behind significant chunks of digital baggage; hard drives whose contents only we know; social media and cloud archives whose logins only we remember; file systems whose structures only we we can navigate. The contents of those may well be lost forever simply through the sheer volume of content that has to be processed to find something of historical significance after the fact, though eventually AI and deep learning algorithms might make this task simpler (to say nothing of privacy and collections that are physically offline).

Maybe this isn’t a bad thing; the last thing the world needs is another shallow depth of field cat photo. As always – we should be raising the bar personally. What we need to do is decide which, if any, images we want to be remembered for – and make sure those are seen, and seen often enough. If it sounds like I’m advocating tighter curation yet again, you’d be right. There’s a reason why so many of the great photographers keep saying that they’d be happy if they create a dozen exceptional, truly unrepeatable photographs over their entire careers – because it’s true. MT

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