Ain’t gonna hang no picture frame
Rob Walker recently posted about Polaroid’s efforts to survive in the digital-camera era. It now intends to offer the PoGo, a digital camera that comes with a built in printer. Judging by the AP review Walker cites, both the camera and printer are somewhat rudimentary, yielding small, low-res prints. This, Walker suspects, will prove to be a feature rather than a bug, since “the imperfections and limitations of actual Polaroid pictures were, in a way, part of their appeal.”
This got me thinking about photos as artifacts, as specific objects that acquire a patina. Part of what makes photos worth saving is not their content alone, the image itself, but also the history that the object itself accumulates as it becomes like a heirloom. And as printing an image becomes more onerous and unnecessary, old photos seem to become valuable in and of themselves, as souvenirs of lost technologies, like old 78s or rotary phones.I wouldn’t want to take the photos I have in box, scan them all, and throw them away (as I did with my CDs after I ripped them to my hard drive). The physical collection has a gravity to it that would be lost and would probably become inconceivable if it were digitized. Handling the objects seems to affect the feelings I have about what I am seeing. (I feel the same way about my long-since-scattered record collection, sacrificed because of NYC-apartment space constraints.) Paging through photo albums, too, is utterly different than scrutinizing image pools online. (This line of thinking makes me wonder if I should print my blog out and bind it, stick it with my college notebooks.)
With actual printed photos, there is a sense that something delicate and ineffable has managed to survive, a small miracle amidst the rampant image destruction we experience in our disposable culture. They seem to have an occult power, as pictures in lockets sometimes seem portentous, mystically imbued with significance. Digitization, though, puts photos in the same category with flickering TV images, meant to be consumed and forgotten after being experienced as entertainment. A physical archive seems to put them in a category with paintings, which invite us to take the time for contemplation. Digital photos are pushing prints further into the rarefied realm of fine art, the audience for them will most likely become reduced to those with the appropriate cultural capital—the aesthetic appreciation training and so on.
Anyway, as a result of all this, I find digital-image frames strange and sad. Would you really stop to contemplate an image in a digital frame? Particularly one that will rotate new images into view like the billboards on bus shelters rotate ads? A certain contempt for memory seems to be built in to this technology. It encourages us to regard nothing framed as permanent, and by extension it prompts us to consider every impulse we might have to frame and preserve a particular image as provisional. The disregard for permanence embodied in such devices as this may establish a kind of material base for institutionalized forgetting. (I typed that sentence a few minutes ago, and now have come back to this and have no idea what I was getting at. Talk about forgetting.) History could be effaced, 1984-style, but worse, we could be convinced by the sorts of things we have in our culture that we shouldn’t even bother with memories. (When people from my high school who I never talked to contact me through Facebook as though we were friends, I have this sense that memory is already under attack—technology affords such interconnectivity that it seems to undermine the finality of choices made in the past, as though they never happened.) There may be no reason to automatically assume that memory preservation is inherently important to us. Given the right conditions, and a certain kind of society fixated on novelty, we could end up with every incentive to try to forget as much as possible, and have new images in our digital frames on a quarter-hourly basis.
Comments
Digital technology does so many things well, it’s easy to forget what it does poorly. I still remember seeing my first photographs, printed from 4x5 negatives.
Comment by tony@comstockfilms.com from NYC — January 19, 2009 @ 3:48 pm
For the past couple of years, I’ve been scanning and annotating a big collection of family photos, working chronologically from the earliest ones (c. 1875) to, so far, the 1950s. I see it as a matter of preserving the photos, not replacing them. In fact, while handling and arranging these pictures I’ve become much more aware of them as artifacts and as expressions of the people who made them and are in them. It’s been one of the great pleasures of the project.
The photos themselves contain a lot of cues about the era they came from: their size, the film quality, the print paper logos and developer marks on the back. The notes on the back may be the only examples we have of some family member’s handwriting. It all goes a long way to help you connect with the historical reality of peoples’ lives in the days before you knew them (if you knew them at all).
The digital versions have their charms, too. Looking at the pictures at screen size rather than at their original sizes has a curious equalizing effect that makes you take smaller, less formal pictures more seriously. You can zoom in to details you hadn’t otherwise noticed. And if you tag them it’s easy to arrange pictures in different ways, chronologically or by who is in them or where taken. That in turn gives you insights about people’s lives that are harder to discover in individual pictures.
So for me it’s all about enhancing memory, preserving it, and learning something from it, all in a way you can transmit to other people in a more convenient form than a bunch of boxes. And then they can load them into a digital frame and see Grandpa’s overloaded hay wagon on the farm in the summer of 1918, and his sons in their WWI Army uniforms, and the 1916 Dodge that was the family’s first automobile, on a rotating basis, without having to have the photo albums at hand. But those are available, too.
Comment by RonCo — January 19, 2009 @ 3:55 pm
I am a fine art photographer, and recently sold all of my digital gear in favour of film photography. In addition to the aestetics of film, which I don’t think are replicated in the digital world, I agree with Mr. Horning that there is a permanence and power to film that is sompletely lostr with the digital world. My mother was an amazing photo album keeper, for which I am eternally thankful. I recently scanned in about 10 albums of photos from my childhood, that I was then able to turn into prints for my birthmother. Given the impermanence of digital files, and the ever changing and unpredictability of storage mediums, I do not think this would have been possible if they shot digital back then.
Even the aging and deterioration of physical images is important. It signifies that they are a living record of life. Not static and sterile as with digital.
All the best,
Sean
Comment by Sean Galbraith from Toronto — January 19, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
<i>I am a fine art photographer, and recently sold all of my digital gear in favour of film photography.</i>
Interesting. I recently sold all of my film gear in favor of digital photography. Over the past few years, I have found less and less time in my busy life to maintain a darkroom and spend the hours there I once did making these beautiful artifacts.
While I miss the inimitable beauty of the well-printed silver image, I knew that I would never again do the kind of photographic work I am best at without biting the bullet and buying a digital SLR. Fortunately, I was able to take advantage of backward compatibility and keep several of my favorite old Pentax lenses. Suddenly, I am a photographer again.
As for the unique value of printed images, I am counting on continued advances in inkjet and laser technology to enable fine art photographers to produce beautiful and wholly tangible fine art objects. I suspect you are consigning the original photographic print to the historical dustbin a bit prematurely.
Comment by DKF — January 19, 2009 @ 4:48 pm
A print is a print, but an electronic album tends to be filled with repetitious and poor shots that would not make the cut if those same images were printed for placement in a real photo album with its limited capacity.
Comment by am from new york — January 20, 2009 @ 9:57 am