“it’s not very difficult, for many people, to witness the destruction of household objects such as crockery. But to see the destruction of personal mementoes, letters, photographs, works of art – that is deeply disturbing.”

“Photography could reach eternity though the moment.”

"Of all these things they wanted a permanent record; they wanted to stop the fleeing events of the moment, and treasure them as long as they lived, and hand them down for the advantage and pleasure of those who came after them."

"But in the domain of photography the amount of 'horse-power running to waste' is appalling – and all for lack of a little system and co-ordination. Shall this be allowed to continue? Shall the product of countless cameras be in the future, as in the past (and in large measure today), a mass of comparative lumber, losing its interest even for its owners, and of no public usefulness whatever? This is a question of urgency. Every year of inaction means an increase of this wastage."

"The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our 'natural magic,' and may be fixed for ever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy..."

THE ART OF PHOTOGENIC DRAWING

Read Henry Fox Talbot's 1839 account of The Art of Photogenic Drawing.

"You may delay, but time will not, and lost time is never found again."

“For over one hundred years artists have made books of a handmade bespoke nature. An awareness of the depth of creativity, innovation and expression that these artists’ bookmakers have accomplished offers the photographer an opportunity to break free of the pervading paradigm and transform their self-published products. Through an understanding of these freedoms and their application the photographer can exceed the basic creative form that pervades the discipline today.”

“I see a lot of beauty in the broken.”

"Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

“there is simply no equivalent of the permanently archived, physically unique photographic negative. Image files are ephemeral, can be copied and transmitted virtually instantly and cannot be examined (as photographic negatives can) for physical evidence of tampering. The only difference between an original file and a copy is the tag recording time and date of creation – and that can easily be changed. Image files therefore leave no trail, and it is often impossible to establish with certainty the provenance of a digital image.”

“A photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move. While it is flat, it is not a true plane. The print has a physical dimension.”

“The material things that accompany us on our journeys through the decades will often outlive us, and they are where we keep the stories we will pass down... a lot of the paper photographs will endure both in museums and in private hands. Indeed they may become more valued as they are recognised to be old, fragile, and rare, but we may forget how to look at them as they were once looked at.”

“How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible.”

“Photography does not create eternity... it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.”

“Internet-centric explanations, at least in their current form, greatly impoverish and infantilize our public debate. We ought to steer away from them as much as possible. If doing so requires imposing a moratorium on using the very term ‘Internet’ and instead going for more precise terminology, like ‘peer-to-peer networks’ or ‘social networks’ or ‘search engines,’ so be it. It’s the very possibility that the whole — that is, ‘the Internet’ — is somehow spiritually and politically greater than the sum of these specific terms that exerts such a corrosive influence on how we think about the world.”

“I buried my negatives in the ground in order that there should be some record of our tragedy.”

"...time and distance have been annihilated by the magic film to bring together the peoples of the world."

“There’s nothing that hasn’t been photographed.”

– Murray Fredericks (Nothing on Earth)

"It’s in a box somewhere… as most archives are."

– Dr. Kitty Hauser

“Internet-centric explanations, at least in their current form, greatly impoverish and infantilize our public debate. We ought to steer away from them as much as possible. If doing so requires imposing a moratorium on using the very term ‘Internet’ and instead going for more precise terminology, like ‘peer-to-peer networks’ or ‘social networks’ or ‘search engines,’ so be it. It’s the very possibility that the whole — that is, ‘the Internet’ — is somehow spiritually and politically greater than the sum of these specific terms that exerts such a corrosive influence on how we think about the world.”

— Evgeny Morozov (To Save Everything, Click Here)

DIGITAL BLACK HOLE

“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...

PHOTO OBJECTIVES

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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“There’s a lot of miles on that photo.”

"...This girl, now in her early teens, had never had a photograph of herself. There was no record of her childhood, nothing which would remind her of what she used to be. There was nothing, no image, of which she could say: 'That is me.' And all this meant that there was nobody who had ever wanted her picture; she had simply not been special enough."

MOVE TO TRASH

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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“Cameras are boxes for transporting appearances. The principle by which cameras work has not changed since their invention. Light, from the object photographed, passes through a hole and falls onto a photographic plate or file. The latter, because of its chemical preparation, preserves these traces of light. From these traces, through other slightly more complicated chemical processes, prints are made.”

– John Berger

FACEBOOK, FRIEND? FOREVER?

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.

"I perceive I have not really understood any thing, not a single object, and that no man ever can..."

— Walt Whitman

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?

TO KEEP, OR NOT TO KEEP?

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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“A picture is a secret about a secret, the more it tells you the less you know.”

— Diane Arbus