“How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible.”
– George Orwell, (Nineteen Eighty-Four)Do you have photographs of your parents? Of your grandparents? What about your great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents? How many of your ancestors left photographs of themselves behind for you to see?
Mother? Yes.
Father? Yes.
Maternal Grandmother? Yes.
Maternal Grandfather? Yes.
Paternal Grandmother? Yes.
Paternal Grandfather? Yes.
Maternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, both.
Maternal Grandfather's Parents? Mother only, aka Grandma Bessie.
Paternal Grandmother's Parents? Yes, I think.
Paternal Grandfather's Parents? Probably.
Great-great-grandparents? Let me have a Google and get back to you!
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DO YOUR PHOTOGRAPHS HAVE NAMES?
I should be more specific. Do your digital photographs have filenames? Of course, by nature, they must. But, what are those files called? Do they have unique names, or simply the names generated by your camera? If you consciously name a set of files, do they all get the same descriptor, or are they each customised? Do you name your folders too? If you go to the trouble of naming your photographs I'd assume you also name your folders, but what do you name them?
I don't name my RAW files, I let the camera do that for me. Although if it allows I will choose to insert my initials into the filename. When, if, I save JPEG, TIFF or other files, I'll batch name the files "YYYYMMDD_Description_##" which translates to something like "20171202_Home_01" or "20180304_Posteritas_©ChloeFerres_01" although this is mainly for the benefit of family, friends or clients who I share photographs with.
But, no matter what, I always systematically name the virtual folders that contain my digital photographs. In my early days, that meant sorting photographs into folders like "Family" with subfolders such as "Chloe" or "Evie" (the family dog). As my photographs multiplied (and I learnt from professional photographers) this method proved to be chaotic and unsustainable. Over a decade ag...
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HOW MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOU HAVE EVER BEEN TAKEN?
Let's start at the very beginning, back in the good ol' days of film. A roll of 35mm film usually has either 24 or 36 exposures, so I'm going to assume an average of 30 photos per roll…
My dad is a prolific documenter of family life, so I'm sure there was more than a few photographs taken of my mum while she was pregnant with me (although can't recall seeing more than one), plus a roll on the day I was born, and at least another in the first month of my life. Let's say one more roll at my christening, and another as they tried to get the image right for my first passport. Add another three for my first overseas trip, one for my first christmas, and two for my first birthday. Let's say four rolls worth for the second year of my life and five for good measure for the third and fourth years of my life. Then my sister was born, queue two rolls, age four is also when started school, so I'm sure the fifth year of my life earned an extra roll for that, and another for my debut in school plays and ballet concerts. The next three years school years were probably equally eventful as kindergarten. The next year got more interesting, with a round-the-world family holiday, and I’m guessing that in itself was worth almost forty rolls of film, although most of the photographs we...
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It is an instinct to collect that draws me to photograph, collecting memories, places, and things. I can't have all things or be in all places, but I can always own a shadow of the real – as Susan Sontag wrote "to collect photographs is to collect the world."
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WHAT DOES A DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPH LOOK LIKE WHEN NO ONE IS LOOKING AT IT?
Like a million pieces of chocolate sent via Wonka Vision, waiting to be recalled, reunited, and consumed – thanks to the imagination of Roald Dahl!
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What is so special about a shoe box that it has become a ubiquitous metaphor for the storage of photos? I don’t think I’ve ever stored photographs in a shoe box (postcards definitely — not photographs). I’ve known tins, bags, envelopes, albums, slide carousels and boxes of photographs to be discovered, but no shoe boxes, per se. Perhaps it’s because the boxes that come complimentary with your shoes are an ideal size for 6”x4” prints. But are there really shoe boxes of photographs out there? If you’ve got one stashed somewhere, please let me know!
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"That is the most important book you will ever make." Dan Milnor recalls telling a Blurb customer in response to the realisation that books could be a vessel for family photos, not just a commercial enterprise. “I can make a book for my family. I can use the photos we’ve had our entire lives.”
It begs the question, what makes a family photobook gift worthy, while a family photo Dropbox account isn’t a present worth sharing?
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TAKE A WALK THROUGH YOUR HOME, WITHOUT MOVING ANYTHING, WHAT PHOTOGRAPHS CAN YOU SEE?
I arrive home, ignoring the junk mail in my hand, I see three bookshelves, laden with words as well as photographs. I put my bag down, grab a glass of water from the kitchen, where any unsightly packaging, including anything with photos, is hidden behind doors. Then I sit down to take my shoes off, to my left is a black and white salon-inspired gallery wall, there's an array of framed prints and, of course, photographs:
- A postcard featuring a photograph of Ansel Adams standing on the roof of a car using a large format camera in Yosemite National Park bought while visiting the park in 2015.
- A promotional postcard from a Trent Parke exhibition at Stills Gallery — a satisfactory substitute for the limited edition print I coveted.
- A candid photo of my now husband and I taken about a year after we'd met.
- A souvenir print of a low plane over Hong Kong, taken when the airport was close to the city centre, I have no memory of this spectacle, yet I did land in that airport as a baby.
- An A4 inkjet print scanned from a 35mm negative of my favourite local architecture — the Sydney Opera House — taken as a high school student in 2006, reminding me that while a photographer’s eye can be developed, an ‘eye' is as innate as it i...
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B-sides, seconds, outtakes, rejects, duplicates, bloopers, mistakes, failures, accidents, out of focus, poorly exposed, boring, unsatisfactory, unacceptable, uninteresting, unflattering or indecisive moments — we’ve all got them, but what do we do with them?
Do you archive them anyway, because the cost of digital storage is negligible? Or do you delete them, if you feel certain they don’t need to see the light of day?
Admittedly, my approach is ad-hoc and non-committal. Sometimes, I delete photographs from my digital camera, if I can clearly see that the photograph is not one I want to keep (although it's not always easy to judge on a small screen). Once I've copied all photographs onto a computer, I usually view them in Lightroom. When I come across a photograph that inspires me to hit delete, a dialogue box pops up asking if to "delete the selected master photo from disk, or just remove it from Lightroom?" The options are to 'delete from disk' or 'remove' — my response is a coin toss, but either way, I will not return to the dismissed digital file again...
In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Victor Mayer-Schönbe...
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HOW MANY PHOTOGRAPHS OF YOU COULD A STRANGER FIND ONLINE?
More than I'd like, probably some I'll never see, some I'd prefer forgotten, but none with consequential regret.
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Facebook allows users to store an unlimited number of high-resolution photos — over 350 million photos are uploaded per day. Sure, you may be happy to give Mark Zuckerberg a royalty-free, worldwide licence to your intellectual property, and apparently “you can delete your account any time” But, is there something you’re missing? And, “what will happen to your Facebook account when you pass away?” Yours, not mine – I don’t have one.
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INSTAGRAM IS NOT A BACKUP SERVICE
Instagram has over 800 million accounts globally — I wonder how many of those users read the Terms of Use before proceeding:
“Instagram encourages you to maintain your own backup of your Content. In other words, Instagram is not a backup service and you agree that you will not rely on the Service for the purposes of Content backup or storage. Instagram will not be liable to you for any modification, suspension, or discontinuation of the Services, or the loss of any Content.”
Where else is your Instagram content stored? Also, when was the last time you read the terms and conditions of any online service before accepting them?
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In Known and Strange Things, Teju Cole reflects on a discussion about photography with an anonymous acquaintance who agreed that “what was important was the possibility of retention, not the actual retention itself."
The emerging trend of photographs taken with no intention of retention — proliferated by apps like Snapchat — was an affront to my photographic sensibilities. My innate belief was that the purpose of photography was to make fleeting moments visible for future time, and I could not fathom premeditated deletion. Nor, I’m sure, could those who pioneered photographic technologies and techniques for fixing the shadows (see also) to surfaces for future viewing.
However, gradually I made new observations about my own photographic habits, discovering that in fact, I did take photographs I had no intention of retaining — I did not actively discard them, but nor did I actively keep, store or care for them. Certainly, I do not need to k...
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