Inkjet Print Survivability

I've noticed over the years that photographers and photography enthusiasts by and large are interested mainly in the technical aspects of print preservation: materials, deterioration, degradation by environmental factors, light-fading and color fastness, and so on. It's an issue in framing inkjet prints, but it's been an area of concern among photographers for a long time. In the days of black-and-white darkroom prints, it was always a topic of lively interest, to the point that people argued spiritedly (and seemingly endlessly, although the end eventually came) over the efficacy of different types of print washer designs.

Although I'm not uniniterested in this aspect of print preservation, I find I'm much more interested in an entirely different area of print life expectancy (LE)—you might even call it "picture LE"—: survivability.

And what do I mean by "survivability," and what's the distinction between it and what people call "preservation" or "print longevity" or "permanence"?

Well, let's say you make a print of a beautiful picture of your spouse. You take every reasonable effort to adhere to archival best practices: you use tested materials (pigment-based ink, paper of the correct pH), you have it framed by a framer you know is well versed in museum practices, you keep it away from direct sunlight, etc., etc.

Ten years later, your new spouse finds the photograph of your now ex-spouse and, in a huff, throws it in the trash. 

Voilà: The difference between "permanence" and survival, in a nutshell.

Attic wonderland
Or consider my experience when I first thought of all these issues. (My apologies if you've heard this story before.) During a 1980s visit to my grandparents, I spent three days in their attic, a treasure trove I still occasionally have dreams about all these years later. My grandmother's deceased sister had been a flapper in the '20s, a girl straight out of The Great Gatsby (she died at 22 of sin and bathtub gin), and they still had a lot of her clothes in their attic. Not only were there lots of my grandparents' things in it, dating from the '20s, but a lot of the contents of my great-grandparents' attic had been deposited there, too. There were thousands of old things somebody once thought too valuable to throw away. There was a trunk of antique china someone thought had gone out of fashion by maybe 1915; a set of silver spoons that had come over from England in the expedition financed by Lord Baltimore in 1750; old dog-eared first editions of various books by Mark Twain (my great-great-grandfather had been a fan)—and thousands and thousands of photographs, going all the way back to 1840s Daguerreotypes.

Family Daguerreotype, c. 1840s, from my grandparents' attic. (Also an old drafting pen set.) I found pictures of this baby as an adult, too, and pictures of her babies.

I noticed at that time that the pictures which appeared to have survived in the best shape were black-and-white prints from the 1930s and '40s in folders—paper board folders, stiff and luxuriously thick but with a soft surface, of the sort once used by high-society portrait photographers to present their work to their clients. The folders seemed to me to provide the best combination of instant, convenient accessibility—all you had to do was open them up to see the print with nothing between it and you, no glass or anything—and physical protection: almost none of the pictures in folders were bent, creased, or torn, and none of them had been crushed, no matter how much weight had been stacked on top of them.

Folders were even better protection that frames: I found several frames with broken glass, such that the glass had damaged the artwork.

So I wrote a column about that in one of the magazines I used to write for. Recommending folders. Of course, folders are not in fashion, and you really can't get nice ones these days. I tried.

Uh-oh
But there's a more recent coda to the story about the folders. Eventually, my grandparents passed away, the house they had received as a wedding present in 1928 (nice life!) was sold, and the photograph collection from the attic was dispersed or discarded. (I have some of them.)

Most of the old 1930s-though-'50s portraits in folders went to my mother's house in Cambridge, near Boston. ...Where many of them were stored in the basement. ...Where, a few years ago, there was a flood: after several days of heavy rains, my mother said she heard what sounded like knocking coming from the basement—and she opened the basement door to find water just a few steps down. When she got down and peered across the surface of the floodwater, she saw her clothes dryer bobbing over in the far corner of the basement, gently bumping against the joists.

All those nice 1930s portraits: ruined. Those luxurious, thick paper folders that I had so heartily endorsed in that earlier column had met their match; they'd given their contents no protection whatsoever against the wet.

Three-quarters of a century isn't bad, I guess.

Again, that's what I mean by survivability. And here's an interesting aspect of that:

Objects very often fail to survive even when their owners or custodians have every intention of preserving them, and take reasonable precautions to do so.

I had an acquaintance years ago who was very fastidious about his work—very organized, very craft-conscious. Picky. So one time he was moving house, and it was rainy, wet, and muddy outdoors, and a couple of movers were carrying a large crate full of his work down a hillside that had a concrete walkway with steps in it—the kind where the treads and considerably longer than the risers—and one of them tripped, and they both pitched forward, and dropped the crate—which broke open and spilled his beautifully matted prints halfway down the hillside, in the mud and the rain and the wet grass.

He told me that, watching it, it looked exactly as if the two men had deliberately thrown the crate down the hill.

Relative importance
Over the years, I've only known of a few types of photographs where what's called "archivalness"—the keeping or lasting properties of the photographic prints themselves—have been catastrophically an impediment to pictures' survival. Iron-salt prints from WWII, when silver was in short supply; early and uncoated Polaroids; and, notoriously, early Ektacolor prints from the 1960s and '70s, which were what inspired Henry Wilhelm to devote his life to image preservation issues. Oh, and early desktop-inkjet printer prints, of course:

Above: a couple of pages from a book of prints I made for some friends (here I've removed the prints from the book for clarity). In this book I used the printer to color some of the the backgrounds too—these pictures are both horizontals on slightly lighter gray backgrounds. The book was stored closed, of course, and not in direct sunlight, but enough light got to the top of the pictures to fade about a quarter of an inch of the tops of all the pages that were printed up to the edge.

Below: a detail of the top of the page on the right, enhanced slightly, showing light fading. This fading showed up after only a few short years. I was so alarmed by it that I immediately swtiched to a pigment-ink printer.

Between my own photography and my grandaprents' attic, however, I have examples of many different types of photographs dating all the way from the very beginning of photography. Generally, the only ones that show longevity problems—deterioration or fading—are the most recent: Type C prints, Polaroids, and inkjets. Everything else—Daguerreotypes, albumen prints, tintypes, platinum prints, fiber-base silver prints, dye transfers, Cibas, black-and-white snapshots, Kodachrome slides—are fine, assuming you don't mind a few minor, normal, and ordinary telltales of age. (Some people actually like a few honest signs of age, I might point out.) I have a few early resin-coated (RC) B&W prints that are showing signs of problems—just. But many of my later black-and-white RC prints look as good as the day I made them, and many of them are older than my now-adult son. That's why I tend not to worry too much about how archival my prints are—use good materials, educate yourself, and exercise normal caution, and chances are the LE of your prints is going to be pretty good.

Survivability, on the other hand...that's the real rub, in my opinion. Why worry about outgassing or the UV transmission ratings of various types of glazing when there are floods, cloddish movers, and angry second spouses to contend with?

Acts of God, and what you can control
So, then, assuming you agree with me that survivability is a major issue despite the fact that nobody ever talks about it, what are the factors within your control that can contribute to the survival of your photographs? Good question....

(To be continued on Monday).

Mike

Part II is here

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Original contents copyright 2011 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved.

Featured Comment by John Camp: "One of the biggest flea markets in America is at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Ca., on the second Sunday of every month. I usually go, when I'm in town. Last Sunday, I found three separate booths peddling (as minor, cheap items, a few cents apiece) snapshots and family photos, apparently thrown away or acquired in estate sales. A young woman was going through one of the boxes, and she kept showing me photos in amazement (“Look at this one...look at this one...”)

"We have a couple of big art schools around, and she dressed like one of the denizens thereof; in any case, she was amazed by these old photos, most of them pre-1950s—many from the World War II era. Those people are now dying in large numbers, and their estates are being sold off. Nobody knows the people in the photos, and nobody cares, except folks like the young woman, who was looking at them for completely different reasons than the original owners. One photo she found showed three soldiers sitting in front of a hole in the side of a hill, with a note on the back: 'We've been living in a dugout for the past month...." That just astonished her.

"Most of these photos will never be sold. They have no real interest other than personal. I found one from Oregon that showed a lanky young woman standing in front of a genuinely ugly flat-roofed house, holding a baby, and the note on the back said 'Freddy and me in front of our own home.' Obviously a critical point in her life—she had her own home—and probably the life of the baby, who, if he survived, is probably now in his 70s or 80s. I think the chances are, he’s not around any more—that these photos were tossed when he died, or maybe, when his mother died, though judging from this photo, she’d have to be over 100 by now.

"I don't think the big destroyers of photos are physical hazards like flood or fire (though of course, those get some of them.) The big thing is, irrelevance to people still alive: the photos get tossed. Not even sold, most of them—simply sent to the dump. Most of the photos I saw had no artistic or historical merit—just a picture of Uncle Joe standing in front of a bush, maybe with a dog. There's no clue to exactly who he is, or where he is, or exactly when he is.

"There are literally millions of these things: I saw hundreds and maybe thousands last Sunday. I have the nagging feeling that they may have some value, but I can't figure out what that value would be, or to whom they'd be valuable. Our times are so well-documented that they wouldn't even seem to have much archaeological value.

"Still, it seems sad that somebody's life would be of so little ultimate value that their last images wind up at the Rose Bowl flea market, whose motto, I think, should be, "'Where crap goes to die.'"

Mike replies: John, you've pushed another of my buttons, so here's what comes out: Even if it's just for your own heirs and your family's posterity, take a moment to scribble on the back of your prints what they are—who they show, where they were taken, what the significance was. That was another lesson of my short stint as an attic archivist: there's seldom enough information. My grandmother was nearly blind when I visited, but I found I could describe photographs to her, and she would remember the photo and the who-what-where-when-why. She helped me greatly in identifying pictures and making links between generations. She's been gone since, I think, 1989. Just a name and a date might mean a lot to someone.

Oh, and another thought—wasn't a very rare early photo of Edgar Allen Poe discovered at a flea market like the one you describe? Earning a great deal of money for the finder? So there are legitimate treasures amidst all the dross. If you can find them.

Response from Robert: "A few years ago, I sat going through a box of old family photos. Some were familiar, others were from the 1920s or '30s, I turned one of these over to see if there was anything written on the reverse and all it said was 'taken 3 months ago.' I always write the date in full now because of that laughable script."

Featured Comment by Jim Richardson: "You are so right! I've come to the conclusion that, by and large, pictures do not succumb to years, they succumb to events. And that sheer volume—saving everything—is itself a detriment to survivability. It happens when somebody comes on some mountain of old stuff (even if they be wonderful photographs) and says 'What can we possibly do with all this stuff?' That is the danger point, when the next step is the dumpster. Ultimately, the photographs that finally 'go archival' are the one that enter into popular culture and the annals of history to such an extent that future generations will value them enough to save them. For survivability I think that (if I can) getting my pictures into contemporary culture is more important than getting them into archival boxes."

Featured Comment by Stan Greenberg: "Would like to add my 2¢ worth: I run a digital photo archive and cannot agree more with Mike about 'survivability' vs. 'longevity.' An awful lot of our photos survived and became part of our collection by pure serendipity–someone was kind enough to donate and identify them before they passed away. I think a lot of old photographs are tossed simply because the mental and physical burden of dismantling a deceased relative's house and belongings are too much to deal with all at once.

"We can't correct other people's past lack of common sense or foresight, but it certainly is possible to prepare (somewhat) for the future: all of the Archive's photos (and my own personal collection) are organized in directories which include place and date, the file names also have place and date, key words are embedded, and everything is of course backed up (more than once). Agree with Janne that lots of copies and documentation are the best ways to increase (not guarantee) survivability.

"One last word about the value of old photos: value is a very relative and dynamic characteristic. The flea market photos (and our achive pictures) may not have much artistic or financial value, but the background information they contain (how people dressed, what they thought was important, what house interiors looked like, etc., etc.) can often be invaluable. Not to mention sentimental value, if that young soldier from 80 years ago happens to be your great-grandfather."

Comments

[Doug C]

I spent the day today sorting old prints, C-type ones. They seem to be holding up well, the EP-2 prints from 1983-1992 look a bit softer, but I think they always did just a little. The whites were never as clean as RA-4 and have darkened a bit. And they may have lost a bit of density at the other end of the scale as well, it's hard to tell.
The RA-4 prints, 1992 on seem to be essentially unchanged, I hope ink-jet prints can do as well. Wilhelm rates the better ink/paper combinations about as highly as the Fuji paper I generally use.
They were all stacked on shelves, so pretty good conditions, but nothing fancy.

[Chad Thompson]

There's a wire sculptor in our neighborhood than hangs his art on random light poles and stop signs and such. I've been tempted to do something similar with some of my less successful tintypes (actually aluminum) by just nailing them to telephone poles. I'd be curious to see just how well that lavender sandarac varnish holds up.

BTW the wire sculptor's work is here: http://goo.gl/uzad1

[Jeff]

Simple...just be good enough so that your prints end up in a museum collection. :)

More realistically, the advent of self-publishing currently allows many photographers, even casual ones, to display their work in book form, subject to its own LE and survivability issues.

This brings up another issue beyond LE and survivability, which is accessibility. Pictures may survive, but who will have access to them? Another issue altogether, and one that brings up all sorts of other factors, technological and otherwise.

[Mike Johnston]

Jeff,
You've just anticipated a point from Part II!

Mike

[Janne]

As much as we like to tout the longevity of analog media, the fact is, survivability isn't great. Most analog stuff has been destroyed over the centuries after all - for every surviving runestone or cartouche thousands are long since lost.

The way to ensure longevity is the same way our genes do: copies. Lots and lots of copies. We're never going to lose the image of Mona Lisa, or Beethovens Ode of Joy. The original painting may get destroyed at some point, and as far as I know the original score may be long lost, but there are so many high-fidelity copies out there, both physical and digital, and so many new ones created every year, that the works are unlikely ever to disappear.

That's one of the tragedies of the endless copyright term extensions. We're losing a large number of abandoned or orphaned works forever since they can not legally be duplicated and preserved. A book that never made a commercial impact on release is very likely to disappear altogether over time. Very, very few works are still commercially viable after a century; we're sacrificing the bulk of human creative output of an era in the name of protecting that small slice.

[Bryce Lee]

It is not the photograph that is valuable. rather the memory or memories. My brother now a resident of Texas and now too of the USA, told me he has no interesting in our family's Canadian past. Our family was United Empire Loyalists and we can trace our roots back to that and beyond. Anyhow, as Mike have marked in pencil all the photos I have collected from the now sold (in 2010 for seven figures) family house,and have filled a wall in my small office of all the framed photos, to remind me every time I look at them of their past and soon at age 65 my current past.
I think that as we become older in terms of years, we wish we had asked more questions of more people, then written down the replies as pencil to paper because only actually written documentation seems to survive, somewhere. Photos fade, and budgets of archival materials are destroyed to allow for more "important" items to be retained.
Figure two hundred years from now will any of us ever be able to return and recall that what was anywhere? Or will there be anything remaining? One may only surmise.

[Ted]

It's funny how humans will endlessly chase exotic technical solutions, but bring up simple but boring solutions and people don't want to deal with it.

Check out the book "The Checklist Manifesto" for a similar thing from the medical field; it's a fun book.

[Geoff Wittig]

About 12 years ago my wife's grandmother, then age 98, showed us a really stunning photograph of her with her two siblings, taken when she was 18. They were dressed in their finest, and the print was astonishingly detailed. (Large format capture easily trumps the limitations of circa 1910 optics). I believe it was a platinum print. While the image itself was in remarkably good shape, the paper was damaged by water stains and mold, and there were several tears.

I had just gotten a good scanner, so I did my best to repair the image in Photoshop (version 5). I matched the warm tonality of the original, and made inkjet prints for all her surviving adult children, who were delighted.

The original print ended up in the possession of my wife's mom, who subsequently developed Alzheimer's disease and...well, we have no idea where it is now. But at least we still had the digital file and...er, no. Unfortunately this was before I got compulsive about backing up my files. It was lost when my computer crashed circa 1999.

So today the only surviving version of this image we can find is a 12 year old inkjet print. Still looks great, though! It was printed using HP's first generation "Photosmart" inkjet, a huge clunky beast that couldn't print any bigger than 8x10", but had the virtue of using pigment ink in the black cartridge. The prints have held up remarkably well.

I sure get the difference between print life expectancy and real-world survivability.

[Moose]

"I don't think the big destroyers of photos are physical hazards like flood or fire (though of course, those get some of them.) The big thing is, irrelevance to people still alive: the photos get tossed."

"Even if it's just for your own heirs and your family's posterity, take a moment to scribble on the back of your prints what they are—who they show, where they were taken, what the significance was. That was another lesson of my short stint as an attic archivist: there's seldom enough information. My grandmother was nearly blind when I visited, but I found I could describe photographs to her, and she would remember the photo and the who-what-where-when-why."

When my mother died four years ago, we knew the well organized album of early family images. At the beginning, mom had carefully kept the negs behind the prints in the album on acid free paper (What a blessing!). We knew, more or less, the extent of the boxes of later, unsorted and mostly unlabeled family snapshots, the sea of my father's slides, and so on.

What completely surprised and flabbergasted us was the box of old images, from her grandparents generation through her older childhood and her courtship with dad. None of us had ever seen them or recalled her ever referring to them! And many of her and dad are just delightful.

None of us could figure out why they had been kept hidden away, like there was some secret about them. They opened up a whole new, to us, chapter of mom's life - and raised all sorts of questions about the older ones. But she wasn't around to answer them.

A couple of my brothers were able, with the help of a couple of books of family history, to identify most of them. But I found myself little interested in those who came before the grandparents and one great grandmother that I personally knew.

There is indeed a shelf life . . . Just as well, I think.

Moose

[Will Frostmill]

Mike,

This is one of those posts that creates a geas upon me - I must answer.

For all the many, many, things my grandfather did wrong archivally, (cellophane tape! non archival paper! crunchy brown glue!) he did succeed on survivability. I have a six volume set of 11x17 scrapbooks filled with annotated photographs, ephemera, letters to and from people famous and obscure. The record is only of his life,and stretches from 1898 through the middle 1960's. Within are quarter plate contact prints of the first class he taught, and visiting-card type portraits of friends, family, and famous people, interspersed with descriptions and commentary about the furniture and artwork he and his parents amassed. (Protip: he wrote up a description and provenance in terrible, terrible handwriting, that he pasted to the back of every single framed thing in his entire house. Sometimes including a little envelope with relevant clippings or photocopies.)

Sadly, fifteen years after we disposed of the estate, I finally found the scrapbooks in a box in my basement. (Among the other things he did wrong, they looked like junk, and were assumed to be part of his wife and kid's hoarding problem.) Almost all the 'stuff' he had cataloged and given provenance to has been lost, thrown away, stolen, donated, or given to friends I haven't seen in a decade. But, I still know his thoughts about what he deemed important in his life, and I know exactly who appears in other family photos now.

There are other successes and tragedies in my family's life. My father left me a half dozen carousels of Kodachrome, neatly labeled with date and place. My grandmother inherited a scrapbook from her family...that has no labels whatsoever, and no one thought to ask her about it until her dementia was well advanced. My father in law died unexpectedly, not more than six months after turning down a request to tell his favorite stories to a tape recorder. On the other hand, my other grandfather was a professional photographer, and left me 20-odd albums, neatly labeled, with contacts, 5x7's and 8x10's he snapped with his beloved Rolleiflex and Spotmatic.

Oh, and one final victory for my Grandfather and his scrapbooks? He made a second set for my dad :)
Backups are priceless.

[Mathew D. Hargreaves]

Mike,

One thing you missed that is worth pointing out: Where are the negatives for the old family photos? Those always disappear first and certainly would be the best route to replacing an aged or damaged print. When my Uncle died in 2009 I inherited the house and the contents. while my brother and his son were packing up the antiques, I was digging through everything to locate all of the family photos, and newspaper articles dating back to the 1920's, that were about family events and deaths. So it was all saved for scanning and dissemination to the family. Once I have large amounts of spare time. Instead I shot a couple hundred digital shots today, and mostly for stitching.

CHEERS...Mathew

[scott kirkpatrick]

There's a fascinating exercise in abandoned picture detective work turned into a movie called "The Green Dumpster Mystery." The movie has won awards, been shown on Israeli TV, but as far as I know not been distributed commercially. See http://www1.yadvashem.org/about_yad/magazine/magazine_51/pdf/page09.pdf
. The filmmaker, Tal Haim Yoffe, saw a few pictures poking out of a dumpster in south Tel Aviv, stopped, extracted what turned out to be a larger trove, and spent the following year teasing out information about the family, none still living except through a few inlaws and descendants. The movie built itself in a very nice way as interview after interview became scene after scene. At the end he was able to make permanent the story of three generations of a family, with the grudging, at first, thanks of the handful of close survivors.

scott

[Ken Croft]

I am interested in your having found daguerreotypes in the basement. I have long been a lurker at antiques fairs in the UK where one can often find old pictures mounted in plush lined gold-coloured metal frames, that the sellers claim to be dags. Usually they are not dags, but ocasionally they do turn up. The best one I found was in just such a frame but the seller did not know it was there and neither did I, because it was behind what I think is a calotype which fell out of the frame after I bought it, revealing the dag behind it. I have found daguerreotypes very difficult to photograph because the reflected light has to be exactly right. All of this is softening you up for a question that I almost dare not ask, because of your vast experience. But the question is, are you sure you have found actual daguerreotypes, because the picture you show seems to have been photographed without a problem. Sorry for having the audacity to question your findings. [Now I lurk around antique fairs in France, where I now live permanently]. cheers
Ken Croft

[Gavin MclLelland]

Mike
My Great Great Uncle William Brown was a keen photographer and my Grandfather inherited his collection of glass "magic lantern" slides. We worked as doctor all over Scotland and travelled when he could all over the world. I remember viewing slides of the Pyramids. When the family house was sold in the early 80's my Grandfather gave the bulk of the slides to a local professional what happened to those and him I don't know but a series my GG Uncle took in Shetland he gave to the Museum up there. They paid him £300 for them which came as a bit of shock!
You can see him in action here:
http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/index.php?a=advanced&s=item&key=XYToxOntzOjEyOiJQSE9UT0dSQVBIRVIiO3M6ODoiQnJvd24sIFciO30=&pg=266
The other tale I have to tell is of an album of family photographs that ended up in Australia. It had inscription in the inside cover with my Great Grandmothers distinctive surname in it "Hurst-Hodgson" and mention of her address in Bedford, England. A lady bought in a flea sale and posted the inscription on a Genealogy website in 2006. I took up researching my family history in 2008 and came across it then. She kindly sent it to us here in England. It contains the only photos of my Great Grandmother as a young woman clearly enjoying herself, she died shortly after my Grandfather was born after a difficult illness and life. It was a great comfort to my Grandfather to see these photos.
So if you want your photos to survive - make sure they are of Museum Quality and survive long enough to become of interest to a museum! and don't ever doubt the benefit of an inscription on the back of photo or album in ensuring that they connect with your family or others.
The web and electronic media can be a great threat to photographs but also a great benefit it's easy to make multiple copies and store them elsewhere surely the greatest aid in survivability just make sure people know what they are

Gavin

[Mike Johnston]

Ken,
So you'd be convinced if I published a worse photograph of it? [g]

I don't mind you asking--in fact another commenter raised that possibility, but we decided after discussing it not to publish his comment. I believe it's a Dag, although it's possible it's an Ambrotype under glass. I admit the casing is a bit more typical of Ambrotypes, but I can get the image to "go negative" by turning it this way and that against the light, which is the reason I always thought it's a Daguerreotype. And it *is* difficult to photograph.

Pulling the image "sandwich" out of the case I find a Daguerreotypist's label, but there's really no way to confirm for certain (well, for ME to confirm for certain, as, no, I'm not an expert on early photographs) without pulling the sandwich apart, which I'm unwilling to do because I'd almost certainly damage it. (Speaking of preservation...I was notorious as a kid for destroying things by taking them apart to see how they worked. [g])

It's also quite possible it's one of Frederick Archer's "fake" Daguerreotypes, the so-called collodion positive, which would explain the glass, the "sandwich" and the appearance of a black backing.

I could take it to a real expert, of course. I'll think about doing that. Could be interesting.

Mike

[Malcolm]

I'm sure it will be covered but I have CD's from around 2000 that are already unreadable. I now have multiple hard drive back ups in different geographical locations. I will just keep copying onto larger and larger hard drives, but I'm sure that will change one day too.

I have old family albums that I have scanned and sent out to cousins. I just wish I had more antique photos to look at, there are far too few in my family.

[Dennis Ng]

Survival is no longer a photography thing but a total economy.

What you need is a kind of multi-region digital archive maintained by legal foundation with endowment from subscriber (long gone). People goes to visit, like graveyard sweeping (in Chinese tradition done 2 times per year, or at least one time) and pay a bit to increase your ancestor (and you in the future)'s endowment.

That may keep those online and offline forever.

It is a kind of Congress Library for the society, by the society and for the society. In case there is a nuclear war between US with someone, another cultural revolution in China, or ... The thing must be multi-area e.g. one in US, one in China and one in, say, Russia/Brazil. (Rama would build these in 3 sets.) If system is provided against flood, nuclear war, ... etc. (like seed bank in some icy places somewhere), it might be good enough and still viewable by descendants and other interested people.

To avoid technology issues, one may even store another copy in microfilm in a time capsule.

[john robison]

Trouble is photographs today are too common and too easy. Taking family photographs used to be an event, even 'snapshots'. Still remember my mom getting out the 616 Kodak box camera and loading it with a roll of B&W just purchased at the drugstore. And then trying to get my 4 year old butt to sit still long enough in the bright, harsh summer sun to take a picture. My cute little blond 2 year old sister was much more compliant than her hyperactive older brother. With only 8 shots there weren't many second chances. Then, leaving the exposed roll at the same drugstore and waiting a couple of weeks until that magic yellow envelope came back with eight deckle-edged glossy prints. And there I was, with a twisted snarl, looking to the left at my sweet little sister who, I was sure was trying to get her hands on my box of animal crackers clutched tightly in my greedy little hands. Like I said, 'an event'.

[Sean]

My favorite essay from Looking at photographs is John Thomson's Old furniture on page 36.

I use to sell used furniture in a little shop much like the one in the photo and on flea markets where only the broke would need to visit or eagle eyed antique dealers looking for a hidden gem. The furniture usually came from house clearances of the deceased. Once the relatives had rifled the things they felt worth hanging on to, they'd call us.

I've sold dead mens shoes, suits, spoons, knifes, forks even hair brushes & dresses. We'd simply lay them out on the floor or table at flea markets that had a lot more in common with the markets in Don McCullin's shots from In England, than the one's you'll find from the Rose Bowl.

I wonder how many Rosebuds I sold or tossed in a skip. The value you place on the things you care about will likely die with you. If your photography is a record of your living, you have to hope that they end up with somebody who truly sees the value in them

[John Brewton]

Mike, a good column and read. In 1965 a woman in our town died with no heirs. Through family connections I was one of the first persons to go into her house. She never threw anything away. We found four steamer trunks in the attic - full of human hair! We even found the receipt for the building of the house - dated 1883 for the princely sum of $800. She had many cameras dating back to the early 1900's - old box cameras and Zeiss and Kodak folders. All the photos stored in many boxes and albums were in perfect condition. She was a meticulous recorder of history and most of the pictures were labeled with date and info. One in particular caught my eye. It was a picture of a group of men on the back of a railroad car surrounded by a crowd. I turned it over and with the date was the notation "Teddy Roosevelt came to town today and made a speech". I turned it back over and peering closer there was Teddy! You just never know what will turn up.

[Tom]

There is always that chance that your old prints will be immortalized by Superbomba... http://superbomba.tumblr.com/

[Herman]

There has always been a lot of talk about the archival quality of a print,
but I'm only concerned that it lasts as
long as I do. The photos that end up on a website will no doubt outlast me.

[hugh crawford]

One of the things that drives me nuts at the flea market is seeing a pile of snapshots that have been removed from albums next to a pile of albums with captions and little bits of glue from where the photos were. I always tell the vendors that I'd pay $100 for the album intact but that the destroyed album is worthless to me. I encourage the rest of the TOP readership to do the same.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

In my collection, I have a number of 1960s color snapshot prints that are faded almost to invisibility. I also have quite a number of Ektachrome slides (which I note are missing from your list) that are visibly faded. And a few of my early B&W prints that are yellowing locally or in general from inadequate washing. So to me, "archival processing" is even more to the fore than it used to be; I'm seeing the results of not doing it right, or picking the wrong materials, in my own work and my own collection.

The general question of life expectancy is very much to the point. I'm probably going to present people with a too-big collection when I die, even if they're neatly sorted by date and many are tagged with names and locations. (Not expecting this to be a problem any time really soon, you understand.) I've been thinking about tagging them as to which historical archives might care -- stuff I shot at college going to the college archives, stuff from before that to the historical society in my home town, and so forth. A bunch of my early work in science fiction fandom is already archived at a place called fanac.org.

I've also placed a number of photos under creative commons licenses, and put some up on Wikipedia when I had relevant photos (mostly science fiction authors); one of the most common relatively late (1976; he died in 1988) photos of science fiction author Robert A. Heinlein that you'll find around the web is mine. There must have been hundreds of people shooting snapshots of him at the World Science Fiction Convention in 1976 (I saw other people shooting, there were thousands of people present, and he was the Guest of Honor, and making his first convention appearance in many years), but I haven't seen any of those on the web yet.

[JasonP]

Survivability is not only dependent on materials or random acts of god but the forethought of the "archivist". My parents house, about 200 miles north of Milwaukee, doesn't have a nice dry attic to put items out of sight/mind for decades. The choice is either a somewhat damp basement (I don't believe your folder-stored prints would have survived, flood or not) or the unheated storage shed out back. Most of my bedroom was moved to said shed when I moved out... will any of it last until I can get it to better storage? Maybe, maybe not.

As for actual photos, the thousands and thousands I have on my hard drive are probably on par with the Rose Bowl flea market except for one thing... I'm a firm believer in metadata. Every photo I have kept since I've gone digital 11 years ago has the location (text) embedded in it (geotagged coordinates for the last 5 years) event or reason in the folder name and for the last handful of years, some additional keywords. Should someone ever find a permanent method of storing digital photos (short of printing them!) at least there will be some context (and therefore some worth) to the mediocre photos found on the hard drive purchased for a dime at the flea market of the future.

[MHMG]

Mike wrote: "It's also quite possible it's one of Frederick Archer's "fake" Daguerreotypes, the so-called collodion positive, which would explain the glass, the "sandwich" and the appearance of a black backing."

Mike, it does look more like an ambrotype to me in your reproduction of the image, but in any case, daguerreotypes are really easy to tell apart from ambrotypes without having to take them out of the case. They weren't called "the mirror with a memory" for nothing. Daguerreotypes, even ones with a fair amount of tarnish, are going to appear to have a silver mirror finish at various viewing angles with the faintly negative image, and then become positive usually by angling the reflection of the velvet side cover onto the cover glass of the image. The image literally is formed upon a polished silver surface, the silver having been plated over a copper plate and then buffed to a high mirror-like state before sensitizing the plate. Ambrotypes are altogether different in composition and should not easily go negative on you under most angles of viewing, but they are indeed underexposed wet collodion glass plate negatives. They generally have a kind of tan or milky gray appearance to midtones and highlights of the image. To create a positive viewing experience out of the thin density negative, the glass plate negative was then physically backed by black paper or velvet fabric which causes the negative to appear as a positive. Although you can find an angle under some lighting conditions that will allow the "negative" image to be seen, it will be faint but not associated with a mirror-like polished silver appearance. A tarnished appearance is also rare to non existent on ambrotypes. Deteriorated ambrotypes will show glass corrosion and cracking/flacking in the image. Tintypes were made the same way as ambrotypes but instead of using a glass plate negative, the photographer bought a package of thin black japan-varnished iron sheet to use as the substrate upon which to coat the wet collodion process. Then name "tintype" is therefore a bit of a misnomer since the metal plate wasn't tin. Hope that helps.

[Eli Burakian]

Another interesting thing to note is that the media we record on, for the most part, like DVDs and hard drives, won't last that long. Hard drives fail, and dvds become unreadable. So unless we continually back these all up on newer discs/devices, the originals will be lost.

I wouldn't be surprised to find prints of our digital files that are all that remain of the original image. So a print is basically a permanent digital file backup! (Although it's more like a jpeg than a raw file).

[Steve Rosenblum]

I think that the real lesson in this article is that prints end up in boxes, albums, etc.. and actually survive to reside in someone's grandmother's attic to be discovered by a relative perhaps 4 generations hence. I am not as optimistic about the billions of digital images of family life that are now accumulating. How many people are going to actually migrate all of their family photos in a disciplined manner to each new form of storage before the old form of storage either degrades or becomes obsolete and unreadable? I suspect very few.

Because my friends know that I am "really into photography and computers" I frequently get asked about which camera to buy, which editing program, website, etc.. Here is what I tell them: When you return from your vacation/kid's birthday party/graduation/etc.. take that little memory card of yours over to Costco/Walgreens/CVS/Target/etc and make prints of the photos you like. If you are not disciplined enough to put them in some sort of archival album, put them in a shoebox. Your great-granddaughter is much more likely to find the shoebox than your computer hard drive or Picassa page. Yes, make a cool webpage of your images or put them on Facebook for friends and family to see now, but please make them into prints. Physical objects have a way of persisting. If you don't want boxes of prints and you care about the images you can also make them into a photo book using one of the online services provided by Apple, Shutterfly, and their ilk.

[Jay]

I'm afraid that some of us pessimists would end this discussion with "what's the use" as even cave paintings, petroglyphs and pyramids continue to erode—er, survive.
Movie films (most theatricals still use film stocks) are stored in underground salt mines and perhaps we (archivists) should find our own caves as well (backyard bomb shelters come to mind).
BTW, can you just imagine a well-written and thorough treatise by Ansel Adams about digitizing his negatives and prints might be like...
...'zeroing and leveling' out the planes of the scanner, proper cleaning of the glass platen, choice of scanning lens for correct 'drawing' of the image and resultant 'compensating' scan to achieve wide latitude and good d-max, all the while atop(TOP) of an International Harvester wagon.

[Chad Thompson]

If you can accurately date the image to 1840's it's almost certainly a Daguerreotype. Since the wet plate process didn't exist until 1851.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Okay, here's my idea for "Hybrid archiving":

Define a format, using a 2-dimensional high-density bar-code, to encode about a megabyte of data onto a letter-size sheet, with about four square inches set aside for text and a small thumbnail. Use jpeg encoding (but document it and build it into the software, don't depend on jpeg viewers remaining common. Be sure to use some sort of ECC format, to deal with some level of loss over time.

The specs as given may be asking too much out of the high-density barcode (nearly 20KB per square inch), though. But even a 100KB jpeg is actually a fairly detailed picture; a 1MB jpeg is really quite huge.

Now, you can convert your photos to moderate-resolution digital forms and store each on one sheet of high-quality paper, printed with carbon B&W inks. Anybody finding them will know they're photos, and have some idea what they are of (from the text and thumbnail)

This relies on the persistence of the documentation for the software standard (doesn't exist yet) and the continued existence of scanners or sufficiently high-resolution cameras.

[Sue]

Hi Mike

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