Memories are made of this

The Galway Advertiser, a newspaper which this blog has some loose connections to – in that it has published some of my photographs (most recently the image you see above, which appeared in its Mayo sister paper) – celebrated its 40th birthday yesterday and marked the occasion with a 72-page supplement recalling the newspaper throughout its 40 year history.  Also yesterday it put its entire archive of newspapers online for the first time.  It’s fascinating to look back at some of the papers from the 1970s, and one thing that quickly becomes obvious when you do so is how important the photographs in each paper are in helping to preserve memories and re-tell stories 40 years on.  That is something that all photographers, be they hobbyists or professionals, should bear in mind.

Perhaps it’s my bias, but as I looked through some of the early editions of the Galway Advertiser last night I found that it was the pictures and not the words that drew me into different stories.  In the early days these pictures weren’t always photographs – some were drawings, perhaps illustrating adverts or stories – such as that which accompanied an article about the future of space exploration in the first edition, and which gave the reader an artists impression of what the soon-to-be-designed Space Shuttle might look like.

Be they photographs or illustrations, those visual aids serve as important elements in telling, or rather re-telling, stories from 40 years ago when we look back at those first editions.  This of course equally applies to archives such as the Irish Times or the BBC online archive – and all serve to prove the old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words.

And why is all this important to photographers?  Well it’s relevance to, say, photojournalists is obvious – one hopes the work they produce now will be viewed for many years to come.  But those of us who aren’t producing images on a daily basis for professional purposes equally have a role to play in capturing images of society today that will form the basis for future memories.

While it is the digital age which makes all this easier, and has resulted in the online archives I’ve referenced above, it is also true that the digital age gives us something to think about as photographers, and in particular if and how we archive our images.  Not just important images, such as wedding photographs or pictures of your family, but all the photographs you take.  Afterall every photograph you take has the potential in the future to help document the moment of time in which you took it.  Even if you might consider it now to be a bad photograph.

This is one reason why I don’t delete images – who’s to say that an image I decide is worthy of deletion now won’t be one that I wish I had kept in the future. And even if, as is more likely, I look at it in twenty years time and think “why did I keep that?”, what harm is it doing to keep it… just in case.  Storage is cheap, and 1s and 0s take up very little space compared to their printed equivalents.

Though that raises an important issue.   I mentioned earlier about hoping that photographs will be viewed for years to come.  But in order to be viewed, they have to be viewable.  And when images are stored in digital format, there are concerns about the longevity of those formats.  Coincidentally this aspect of digital photography got a brief airing in the middle of a long list of comments on a recent blog post by Roger Overall on value, which is itself a whole other discussion.  Of relevance to this discussion though is what Roger had to say about some of the potential issues with storing images in digital format as opposed to in print:

“1) The ink layer in CDs/DVDs will corrode. Magnum, one of the leading photographic agencies, rates them at about 10 years – after which they can become illegible.
2) Even if they last longer, computers in the years ahead may not be able to read them. Apple is already shipping computers without optical disc readers. Remember those old floppy discs? The same will happen to optical discs.
3) Placing image files on hard drives doesn’t solve the problem entirely, as they are prone to failure.
4) Backing them up in the cloud is an option, but doesn’t guarantee access for later generations. Will your children and grandchildren have access to your cloud account?
5) File formats become obsolete. For instance, Canon has already shifted its proprietary RAW format once and allegedly doesn’t support its own old format. Also, the most popular file format at the moment is JPEG, which will be replaced. Who knows what file formats can be read in 100 years time? It’s impossible to say. What we do know is that a print will still be visible. It is tried and tested.”

This is very much a worst-case scenario view of the future of the digital images you or I may be shooting today, but the point is valid – there is a need to bear in mind that today’s technology may not be tomorrow’s.   The solution may not be to print every single image you take – that’s just not practical – but it may be to keep aware of the fact that you’ll want to future proof your images as much as possible by moving them onto newer media as that takes hold.  For me, the safest bet currently is to keep images on multiple hard disks – I can easily move them onto newer, bigger hard disks as that need arises, and should the hard disk be obsoleted by some new type of storage in the future, I can be pretty confident that there’ll be a path to migrate stuff from hard disk onto that also.

One other consideration for me (and I have first hand experience of this) is that printer technology is constantly improving, and with it print quality and print lifetime, so while I could print all my images now, I might get better longer-lasting images if I print them in five years time instead.

Coming back to the Galway Advertiser, the first photos I had published in the paper were of the Volvo Ocean Race stopover last year.  The day after they were published I got a call from Tom Kenny, who runs a gallery in Galway and also does an “Old Galway” page in the Advertiser each week.  He wanted my permission to archive my photos from the Race Village so that “my Grandson can use them in 50 years time for the Old Galway Page”.

That sort of foresight is why the Galway Advertiser was able to put every page from every edition in the last 40 years online yesterday, and why in future years people will be able to look back on images that today may seem like boring snapshots of every day life in Galway and beyond, but in the future may be fascinating insights into life in the past.  A picture is indeed worth a thousand words.