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

— Walt Whitman

HOW TO SEE A PHOTOGRAPH

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.

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

THE PROVERBIAL CLOUD

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.

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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"...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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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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PHOTOGRAPH = IMAGE + VESSEL

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).

“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

WHAT IS A PHOTOGRAPH?

An image captured on light-sensitive material with a camera obscura.

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.

A SIMPLE HISTORY OF VISUAL COMMUNICATION

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.

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

— Diane Arbus

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?