Some photographs are tangible – you can touch them, perhaps even hear or smell them, taste them if you really want to, visible with nothing more than a naked eye.
Others are intangible – you can't hold them, and they are only visible whilst being viewed on a screen, decoded by software, reliant on hardware, powered by electricity.
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The distinction between analogue and digital photography has faded. While the processes remain distinctly different, we live in a hybrid world. Film is scanned and Instagrammed. Pixels are printed – I can even use my phone to expose instant (Polaroid) photographs.
As I look holistically at photographic practices, the words analogue and digital have become somewhat redundant distinctions. It doesn't matter how a photograph was made, just that it was made.
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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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“If there are photos you really care about, print them out,” internet pioneer Vint Cerf once told The Guardian, “we are nonchalantly throwing all of our data into what could become an information black hole without realising it. We digitise things because we think we will preserve them, but what we don’t understand is that unless we take other steps, those digital versions may not be any better, and may even be worse, than the artefacts that we digitised, if there are photos you really care about, print them out.”
His words echo and validate my own sentiment over the past few years.
The digital universe is a scary, albeit brilliant, place.
Post Script — I feel a book of black holes opening up...
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William Morris is reported to have taught, "have nothing in your houses, that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful." In considering my own home, his words have resonated with me, even more than Marie Kondo's best selling philosophy of living with only what "sparks joy." However, when we come to consider the photo objects we keep, I believe both mantras inadequate.
In Evocative Objects: Things We Think With Sherry Turkle notes, "we find it familiar to consider objects as useful or aesthetic...we are on less familiar ground when we consider objects a companions to our emotional lives or provocations to thought."
Photographs can be aesthetically pleasing, functional, as well as evocative (and more) – none of these are mutually exclusive or set in stone, and will always be subjective. But perhaps, thinking about these categories could help decide if a particul...
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At some point, before we can see a photograph, the light we've captured lies dormant in darkness. We require chemistry or electronic technology to make photographs visible.
Once a photograph is made physically visible, as a negative or print, it requires nothing more than light for us to see it. Digital photographic files rely on ongoing intervention in order to be visible — is a digital photograph still a photograph when it’s not being viewed on screen?
When digital cameras were developed, many that argued that digital photography was not true photography. That's changed, so have our dictionaries to reflect evolving language — you'd have a hard time finding someone today that denies a digital photograph its name. While the file may be different from the photograph, they remain inseparable, just as printed photograph is bound to the paper it is printed on.
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Let me begin by saying, the cloud is not actually a cloud, nor is it in a cloud — shocking, I know!
You’re probably wondering where it is then, well, it is right here on earth, so more of a fog, really — a mass of data storage near the earth’s surface. This fog hovers in data centres (which I understand to basically be buildings filled with hard drives), and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of data centres around the world.
While I was wondering where photographs stored in the cloud really are, I started marking data centre locations on a map, until I quickly began running out of room, but I think you get the picture — your pictures could be almost anywhere on earth (but as far as I can see, probably not Antarctica)!
For a more expert, yet accessible, understanding you could read Cloud Computing by Nayan Ruparelia. And, from now on, let us be sure to think of the cloud as a physical storage location, not simply a dreamy, untouchable haven.
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While it may crude to divide the photograph in two, it is necessary to define the parameters of my research. I think most writing on photography (rightly) focuses on what I refer to as the image – I'm interested in studying the vessel.
After sketching this diagram I realised that it corresponds to Stephen Shore's concepts in The Nature of Photographs. He outlines three levels on which a photograph can be viewed: physical, depictive, and mental.
Although the physical aspects of viewing a photograph he describes can still apply to photographs viewed on screen, when the book was written in 2007 (the year I began my tertiary photographic studies) the focus was on printed photographs.
The term vessel was chosen to encompases all photographic containers, both hard (e.g. print) and soft copy (e.g. digital file).
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