Barriers
Volume Excess Surfeit Abundance
Fragility
Alleviations
Curation
Durability Antrifragility Permanence Fixity
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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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Artist: Dayanita Singh
Year: 2013
Description: "File Room is an elegy to paper in the age of the digitization of information and knowledge. The analogue photographer and bookmaker has a unique relationship with paper that is integral not only to the work of making of images, texts and memory, but also to a larger confrontation with chaos, mortality and disorder in the labyrinths of working bureaucratic archives in a country of more than a billion people."
Significance: Dayanita Singh's photographs of papers printed on beautiful matte paper and bound in a book is a cyclical celebration, as is much of her work including Museum Bhavan which repackages museums into concertina books or miniature museums which were subsequently exhibited in galleries and museums around the world. Her work is proof that the SHARE YOUR THOUGHTS + SEE MORE
Artist: Erik Kessels
Year: 2011-2014
Description: "Thanks to the wealth of image sharing sites and the availability of digital cameras, the world is subjected to an avalanche of new photos every single day. For ‘24 Hrs In Photos,’ a single day was chosen, and the images for that day printed out. The result were mountains of photos, reaching from gallery floor to ceiling."
Significance: A key issue I have independently identified is the abundance of photographs, a sea of information, and we’re barely keeping afloat. This work beautifully manifests the concept.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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