Saving private memories
There has been a lot of discussion regarding the opinions of Google VP Vint Cerf in photo and printing circles over the past few days. Now, no one can question my love for the physical—I’ve made my living and career on tangible products from fine art to world history with a lot of self-publishing in between. These kinds of opinions tend to be picked up in printing communities that often have an inferiority complex about their industry. And I understand why. If pundits kept proclaiming you dead then you might get a complex (like Jon Lovitz). But I don’t feel that this sort of direction is really healthy for the print industry.
Print is awesome. It’s personal. It’s tactile. It’s beautiful. It’s portable. But as a modern archival medium, sorry I just don’t get it.
As I was reading through the various posts over the past long weekend, a few points came to mind that I offer with a grain of salt from someone who not only loves the print business but the people who make up the industry as well. I want to see us all succeed. And I’m always happy to be proved wrong if that is the case. So here goes.
My mother worked for a photographer with a consumer photo offering right after WWII. We have tons of great photos, chronicling the lives of all seven of us. The prints are mostly in albums with photo corners holding them in, except when the glue fails of course, when they end up being a bit of a jumbled mess. I have no idea where the negatives are, probably in a box or maybe disposed of accidentally, or just misplaced. Who knows. What I do know is there is one negative and almost always only one print. Once those are gone that memory is gone.
Now take my digital photo library. I’ve used iPhoto in the past but I’m migrating to Mylio. With both I have multiple back ups, with Mylio those happen magically and automatically to my whim. I have backup on a Time Machine drive, in the Cloud, and in many cases on DVD. Which of these sets of memories is more safe for the long term, physical or digital?
I am in awe of great darkroom technicians. When I was at University I did a lot of darkroom work, dodging and burning the evenings away on real paper prints dried on a huge, chrome drying drum. But that is not my life today. Not many of my photos need manipulation because my X-Pro 1 and my iPhone 6 can do things that no gelatin-based film can, including replicating the look of various Fuji films. I have no plan to print out all of my images, even the best ones, unless I’m making a book, a card, or wall art. And even then my most valuable asset remains the original camera file. That’s what I’ll protect.
Here’s the rub in the print industry. People are printing less and the industry is challenged because of it. But the answer is not encouraging consumers to print more stuff just in case your image files at some point in the future might not be readable. The print industry needs to sell print as ‘premium’, as valuable because the content is more special then just something that is consumed and then tossed aside. The quality of print has improved so much in the past 10 years to the point where even basic print assets have accurate color and overall quality. The print business was changed by the Internet and it’s not going back to the days of two daily newspapers in most large cities or of paper books written only by the few that can get the backing of a publisher. The best printers know the market and are constantly striving to sell the benefits of print in the 21st Century.
As an archival medium, digital files are a Godsend. The idea of what you would save from a burning house being your photo albums should be something of the past. You almost have to try to not backup your image files if you use any modern software. Plus digital files don’t degrade if they are stored improperly (although you an make a case for CD rot if you have old PhotoCD images).
Finally, a challenge. This is anecdotal, but I don’t have any digital photo files that I can’t read today. And those go back to the early 90's PhotoCD from my photo lab days. I had no problem at all accessing those files when I did a 25th anniversary book of a group trip to France last year. And once I accessed those files, voila! they now live in my iPhoto archive. So while I applaud Cerf for his “digital vellum” idea, the case that image files won’t be readable in the future as a reason to print them out is a weak one in my mind.
But moreover to my friends in the printing industries, keep looking ahead and make your services valuable and modern. Holding on to old ways of doing things, except for artistic sake, is generally a losing proposition. Keep looking for opportunities to make the physical better than the digital, not reasons to try to turn back the clock.
