Inkjet Print Survivability, Part II

Part I is here

There are all sorts of impediments to print survivability, and how technically "archival" the print itself might be is only one facet of that. Prints can be lost; they get discarded; they can be maliciously destroyed by people who don't like them or don't understand their importance (much of Paul Outerbridge's carefully crafted lifetime body of work was deliberately destroyed by his wife, whose "morality" was offended by their content—partial nudes and some sado-masochistic references). They can tear, crease, get stuff spilled on them, or get crumpled. As John Camp so eloquently described in his Featured Comment to Part I, they can simply lose relevance or interest—when nobody remembers, nobody cares.

...Of course, "nobody" is a difficult set to prove. With most things, finding the person or people who care about them—matchmaking between the right owner and the right objects—is often key. Although that takes time and effort too.

I'll give you an example, albeit a negative one. A decade or more ago, my brother's stepfather, who for many years worked for the Illinois Central Railroad, told me about the fate of 15 file boxes full of railroad pictures, dating back to the 1800s, documenting railway bridges and bridge repairs. The pictures had been stored forever in the company's headquarters, but suddenly they were moving and they no longer had room to store the boxes. Not knowing what to do with them, an executive decision was made: toss them in the dumpster. Now, having worked at a railroad magazine, I know that somewhere, there are railroad buffs or model railroaders who would have been very glad to have accepted those boxes. The problem was that, when the time came, those who were in charge of the move didn't have time to go find those people. (I don't think they tried very hard—there's even an Illinois Central Historical Society! But that's the way it goes.)

Paul Outerbridge, whose wife, after his death, fearing for his "reputation," destroyed many of his fetish pictures. (Self-portrait.)

Some of my own prints suffered an ignominious fate. I took a portfolio of prints to show to a girlfriend at her house—and inadvertently left them behind. And there they stayed. But the relationship eventually turned sour, and it would have been awkward to show up asking for the pictures back because it would have meant an opening for a big emotional scene. Long and short of it—I never went back to retrieve my prints, some of which were unique. I still remember which ones they were, and have often kicked myself for losing them in such a dumb and preventable way.

When I talked to Christopher Bailey a couple of weeks ago—he of the Lost Portfolio—he mentioned that he actually did lose a number of his miniature portfolios because he would send them art directors, or used them as leave-behinds, and they were never returned.

Tell the tale
Stories benefit pictures, too. Some pictures contain their own stories: one tintype I have is of a relative who was a drummer boy during the Civil War. His story is contained in the picture—there he stands, all of 12 or 14, dressed in his uniform, holding his drum. (I also have a society portrait of the same guy half a century later, richly dressed, portly and formidable looking, a captain-of-industry type. Name of Sam Collett.)

You can tell the stories of your pictures, too, to amplify their meaning and help other people appreciate them. I loved Robert's account from Saturday about turning over a photograph from the 1930s to find the legend "Taken 3 months ago" on the back. I can guess the situation: a snapshot mailed to another person at a specific time, probably—a person who would want to know when the picture was taken relative to the "now" of whenever he or she opened the letter. Everything else was understood. Whoever wrote those words was definitely not thinking of posterity. That's okay—not all of us want to use photographs for more than our immediate needs—but it certainly illustrates the frustration of someone decades later wondering about the story of the picture.

Physical damage can descend in a bewildering myriad of forms. In Chicago, I lived in a marvelous rehabbed loft apartment, with 14-foot ceilings, exposed brick walls, and exposed ductwork. But the remodeler had removed the many decades' worth of flat tar roof by sawing down through the layers with a circular saw and carrying it off in 3-foot squares. Unfortunately, the chips and dust created by the saw from the old roofing worked down into the thick boards underneath—which was the ceiling of my loft. So whenever anybody walked on my roof, little bits of tarry material would sift and fall into my condo. I now have dozens of prints that have little unremoveable black tar spots on them.

(You can say I should have kept all of my prints continually covered or put away. All I can say is, that's easy for you to say. Imagine being housekeeping-impaired and coming home at the end of a long day to find black tar dust covering everything in your theretofore clean kitchen. It was all I could do to remember to keep the lid on the sugar bowl.)

Setting things aside helps. Remember the photo of my book from Part I? Just the act of putting a few dozen prints in a book will greatly increase their chances of survival (or would have, had I used archival materials to make the prints). Reason? I've designated them as being important and put them into a handy "final form." Out of thousands of exposures I've selected two dozen, and cropped and sequenced and printed them the way I think they should look. That's enough to at least indicate a sort of value in them. It might not be enough, but it might help.

If you leave a mass of photographica at the end of your life, even just having one box labeled "Valuable Family Photos" would greatly increase the chances of that one box being reserved from the general migration to the dumpster or Goodwill. Not all of your photographs need to survive—but maybe some of them should, and you're the one who knows best which ones those are. So then, tell people. Designate your important work, your family pictures, and so forth. People will be more likely to respect them if you respected them.

Start that box
We need to acknowledge that there are different purposes for archiving our work. While we're alive and working, what we need is to have our "libraries" of all our raw material organized and available for our creative use—and the most organized among us have elaborate systems for organizing and preserving whole archives of shooting. But that can become almost an impediment when we die or retire or move on and our work is no longer needed or used for ongoing creative redaction. Why? Because entire archives are big and unweildy and require a commitment to preserve—a commitment in physical space, in curatorial energy—even in what you might call "psychic" energy. (That is, they are demanding enough of maintenance resources to require that somebody have some regard for their importance.) When an archive is too large and requires too much in the way of resources to maintain, the decision to trash the whole lot of it becomes tempting to temporary custodians who aren't invested in the work or particularly interested in it.

(One of the leitmotifs of my existence is that periodically people come to me asking either what to do with old archives of work, or wondering if, and how, they might profit from them.)

By contrast, imagine having to clear out a relative's possessions, including heaps of undifferentiated photographica, and coming across a single, not-too-big box labeled "MY VERY BEST PHOTOGRAPHS—John Q. Doe, 1937–?" With each picture in the box signed and labeled with date and time and subject? Who wouldn't set that aside and keep it, even if everything else were headed to the thrift shop?

Two boxes of valuable photos are more likely to survive than 20; a file box is more likely to survive than three filing cabinets. And so on. So start that box. Do it now. Why not?

Numbers and locations
But back to physical preservation. I have to acknowledge that there is always an ongoing process of triage being performed here. The fact is, most of us, being clever people, could come up with an infinitely fastidious scheme for ideally insuring the survival of our work. But the fact is, those schemes will require huge amounts of work and attention and effort and time and money, and those are the things we don't have—most of us would rather be out shooting, or at least reading camera reviews and thinking about what lens to buy next.

So it's all well and good to point out that making multiple copies of our prints will increase their survivability, and it's obvious that storing them in different locations will help guard against catastrophe. But often it just isn't feasible to translate that knowledge into action.

Still, it's a bit curious to me that people are so commonly so obsessive about distributing their computer data over several locations, when you seldom hear of people doing so with their prints. The more different places the copies are stored, the better the chance of survival. I've argued in the past that the Folger Shakespeare Library shouldn't keep all of its Shakespeare First Folios. Seventy-nine of them in one place—a third of the copies known to exist—is convenient for scholars, but for survivability, it's a very bad idea. Having the one place be Washington D.C. is an even worse idea—one terrorist bomb, and two-thirds of the world's First Folios could go up in smoke. (Of course that would be the least of the tragedy if such a thing were to happen.) My point is that if they have to all be kept in one place, they'd be better off in the middle of Kansas.

Consider Jacques Lowe. Not much has been made of this, because, again, there were much larger dimensions to the tragedy. It was a significant loss to posterity nonetheless. Jacques, who died at 71 in 2001, was John F. Kennedy's unofficial White House photographer. ("Stick around and record my administration," Kennedy told him. "Don't worry, I'll make it worth your time.") His precious, historically significant negatives were stored in one of the safest places on the planet—the J. P. Morgan Chase bank vault in the basement of the World Trade Center. If anyone had suggest up till September 10th that those 40,000 negatives were in imminent danger of obliteration, the idea would have seemed almost preposterous.

It would have been much better, as it turned out, to have split the negatives into five groups and keep them in five different bank vaults, or, better yet, five different bank vaults in five different cities.

Jacques Lowe, unofficial chronicler of Camelot, moved to France and all but gave up photography after Bobby Kennedy was killed. "I couldn't deal with these tragedies anymore," he said. "I had to get out." There was to be one last tragedy for him, just after his death. Photo by Chester Simpson.

A sterling example of how to use multiple copies and multiple locations to your advantage is provided by our friend Charlie Cramer and his picture Aspen in Fog, Boulder Mountain, Utah that we featured in our print sale that ended just last Friday. In the next two or three weeks Charlie will disseminate several hundred signed prints of that picture to voluntary custodians all over the world—virtually all of whom have pre-qualified themselves as people who value that print, at least to the tune of $175.

It's almost certain that some number of those will not survive over time. Some will perhaps be handed over in divorce settlements or thrown to the vagaries of estate sales; some will be discarded when their owners tire of them; some will be lost to basement humidity or mildew or mold, or perhaps fade from months or years of blazing sunlight. Some will find unsympathetic inheritors. The picture itself might be the victim of changing fashions in photography; some prints, I'm sorry to mention, might fall victim to the irruptions of war, or bombing, or accidental fires, or confiscation. A box will be lost in a house move here, a print will be covered with snow when a tree falls through a roof there. A frame will fall with a crash from the wall and shards of glass will slash one print; another might get shuffled from spot to spot or house to house until the box it's in gets lost. And so forth. But I'll bet a number of them will still be around a hundred years from now, and probably some number will last for two hundred years, or even three hundred. No way to know for sure, of course. But the percentages now favor it.

The major issues in bullet points
So what are the best ways to ensure print survivabilty? Here are the ones I can think of:

• Regard. People think I'm joking when I respond to questions about how to make prints last by saying "be famous." But I'm not kidding. Value is a function of regard, of reputation, of accepted merit—and valuable things get preserved. A Steichen print is more likely to be protected and preserved than an E. O. Hoppé print, and an E.O.Hoppé print is more likely to be preserved than a picture somebody's Uncle Earl took. Of course this aspect of survivability is not usually in our control!

• Consider pictorial content. (I.e., what the picture is of.) Show things that people in the future will be interested in; things that change. (Charlie's picture doesn't do well in this respect. Presumably aspen trees will still look the same a hundred years from now. Then again, maybe not.) Portraits of famous people are more likely to be preserved than portraits of anonymous people; distinctive portraits are more likely to be kept than cookie-cutter portraits that look like a thousand other portraits. And so on.

• Edit. How is some stranger going to know which of your pictures is worthy of attention from others if you haven't even figured it out yet? If you can't sort through the dross to get to the gold, how can you expect some stranger to take the time and effort needed to do so?

• Inform. Things with labels last better because people stumbling across them have a clue what they are; things that go with other things have a greater tendency to be kept (nobody throws away no. 7 of a set of 12 when they're keeping the other 11); and things the significance of which is known can more easily find a home—they can more easily be matched up with that one person or organization that is interested in preserving them.

• Designate. Don't be afraid to set aside a little of your work and designate it for preservation, whether for your family or for posterity. Not everything you touch is worthy of deathless immortality. Someone will be grateful to know what you considered to be of significance.

• Make it real. People like objects. They like to collect things, own things, handle and show off things. A picture that exists only as a file on your computer or an idea in your mind is unlikely to endure, because it isn't a thing.

• Physical protection. Once it's an object, it needs to be protected. Objects are heir to all manner of assault and insult. Preserve against deterioration (light fading, acidity and pollution from within and without, etc.) by all means, but consider protecting the prints against physical harm, too. It's impractical to protect everything against everything, of course, but, again, if you've designated a small amount of edited work for preservation, at least you can take a stab at protecting that work. (A box to put prints in is a good first step.) And a related issue:

• Condition. Keep things in good condition. As the appraisers often remind the audience on Antiques Roadshow, "condition is everything." Damaged, scratched, dog-eared, dirty and decrepit prints are much more likely to be destined for annihilation.

• Craft. Beautiful, carefully made things contain or encapsulate in and of themselves a recommendation for their own preservation. By crafting something in an exotic or beautiful fashion, or with inordinate skill, or with expensive materials, you're communicating that you value it—in a way that can be interpreted as such by people in the future who know nothing else about it. (Just picture in your mind's eye someone holding an object and looking at it saying, "I don't need this, but it just seems too nice to throw away." You might have done that yourself.) (A word to the wise, however: certain strategies can backfire! An excessively ornate or beautiful box, for example, might get your pictures discarded so the box be used to hold something the future owner values more.)

• Play the numbers game. The more copies, the better. It's worth mentioning that this isn't an automatic guarantee, however. There's a story—dim in my memory now—of a guy who collected broadsides and pamphlets during the English Civil War. If it were not for him, all copies would have been lost to history—even though they were reproduced in the hundreds or thousands and distributed everywhere. Of all the people who saw them, only one decided not to treat them as ephemera. So numbers alone don't necessarily guarantee survival.

• Dissemination. The more different places the copies are stored, the better the chance of survival. I might point out that a number of the photographs in my grandparents' attic were there because they were duplicates—family members would have a number of copies printed when they had their portraits made, to send to all their relatives. My grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents saved them, is all. That's how the attic "archive" got so many pictures of aunts and uncles, cousins, more distant relatives, and friends. Even today, when I make family pictures in the summertime, I make copies to send to everyone.

Don't sweat it
And one final option? Don't worry about it. That's always an option. There's nothing that says your pictures have to last. Some people would like it if they would; some people don't care. Life is a river in which the water changes all the time. Not everything need be preserved. If your thing is to make image files out of mere electrons for transient enjoyment, sharing them with the friends you make them for and then letting them evaporate into the ether, lost forever, well, no worries. Personally, I have at least a sentimental regard for those humans of the future whose attics we are stocking with the work we do now. I imagine them—a few of them, anyway—as being interested in what I take pictures of now. I see myself in them—myself as I was in 1983, discovering the treasures of my grandparents' attic.

But that's just me. Where you are concerned, of course, you decide.

Mike

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

Featured Comment by Richard: "I hope your recommendations reach as many people as possible, but unfortunately I think the loss of images will be incurred by people who have never heard of TOP.

"Last year I participated in a course tutorial. We were discussing the culture of the British Seaside Holiday, and people were encouraged to bring along any photographs they had to illustrate the subject. (Martin Parr wasn't even mentioned!) The participants were multinational. What we got were family photos of not only the British seaside, but also for example, the Chilean equivalent from the 1920s. Amazing historical records. Interestingly most people had brought along prints preserved by previous generations. A couple of people provided digital images of recent times, but it was clear that there seemed to be a divide between the time when family members put things thoughtfully in Mike's shoeboxes, and labeled them. (Almost all of these old prints had something identifying then written on the back). The feeling was that habit of keeping photographs as family documents had ended.

"My feeling is that the advent of digital is causing a problem. Even for enthusiast photographers, managing a digital archive is not a trivial task, and it's also one that needs constant maintenance. In addition the commonplace nature of photography these days is turning images into one day wonders that grace a blog page and then disappear. Once the old prints had been put in a box that was it—all it requires is descendants who are suitably attuned to the value of social and family history. Every ordinary family knew how to do this instinctively. Now with potentially valuable documents scattered on mobile phones, Picasa, Facebook pages and heaven knows where, the chance are that those images which would be so useful to future generations will not be preserved. Sure you can print your digital images, but here again quantity and selection prove an obstacle. And why would an ordinary family adopt digital, and then go to the extra expense and bother of printing? Some do, I know, but I wonder how many?

"Something else emerged from the tutorial—the difference between staring at an image flashed on a screen for a short period, and passing around handfuls of prints, or spreading them out on a table to look at collectively.

"This is not a rant against digital. After all, it means that there will be more, probably better-quality documents available. But I think there is an inherent problem when it comes to preserving them."

Featured Comment by Alex S: "NASA had that 'don't sweat it' attitude...."

Mike replies: That is incredible. Just absolutely incredible.

Featured Comment by Don Craig: "Very good series Mike. The archiving problem is hard, from the Library of Congress on down. A couple of years ago I donated a large print (96x42 inches) to my then-employer. We permanently spray-glued it to the drywall in a colleague's office—it could be destroyed, but not moved elsewhere without a Sawzall. The company was sold, the building vacated, and the print now hangs in an empty office building, awaiting the next economic cycle. I think of it as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, artist's statement and all."

Mike replies: A great photo book I've been enjoying recently—The Complete Architecture of Adler and Sullivan, recommended to me by Ken Tanaka—makes me think that photographs might actually be more permanent than buildings, all things considered.

Featured Comment by James Bullard: "Photographs are ephemera, fleeting moments captured and preserved for fleeting segments of a larger time scale. A thousand years from now our best efforts at preservation will all have failed. Enjoy your work in the moment. Enjoy the work of other photographers in the moment. It's all you have."

Mike replies: I used to Zen-riddle my high school students by asking them if they would want their friends to have fun at their funerals. Made for some great philosophical agonizings (are they still "your friends"—a relational definition—if you no longer exist?). My view of the world is not entirely self-referential—I think of it as existing apart from me, and I'm comfortable with that view. In any event, I'm not sure you're right even so: after all, we still preserve the very first photograph ever made—Joseph Nicéphore Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras—I've seen it myself, at the "Art of Fixing a Shadow" show at the National Gallery. A special darkened room was prepared for it, and a piece of thick weighted velvet hung over it, and a guard hovered nearby to make sure nobody kept the velvet curtain up for too long. Barring catastrophe, which is of course always a possibility, or complete deteriroation, also a possibility, I think that object bids fair to last a thousand years, assuming human civilization also does.

In other words, I think you're generally right, but that there will always be exceptions.

Featured Comment by Will Frostmill: "Courtesy of my Aunt the professional Archivist: A brief note on getting things into historical societies and museums: they have to spend time and money to catalog, study, and preserve the stuff you give them. A well labeled, organized, and documented set of anything could make a huge difference. Obviously, if you offer money to them to pay the staff to label, organize, etc. then that helps too. There are only so many people who work at a museum, (even interns and students), and there is only so much climate controlled cold storage. But a sufficiently large collection, even a very valuable one, could bankrupt them, even if they had the cubic feet to keep it."

Featured Comment by Mark Walker: "Great article, Mike. Note to self: buy shoes, keep box."

Comments

[Jeff]

I repeat my suggestion from Part I that prints can be put into book form, made relatively easy these days by self-publishing software. The book lends itself to both the print and the accompanying narrative. The book becomes the box. And storage only requires a shelf or table.

I recognize that book reproductions are not the same as fine prints (although some books include them), but I treasure the books from photographers I admire, especially from those whose prints I'm not fortunate enough to own. Many of the reproductions are jewels.

I currently maintain 2 portfolios of my best prints; one for black and white and one for color. I constantly update and rotate the prints, keeping in mind some meaningful sequencing. I fully anticipate that over time there will be more portfolios, with some eventually translated into book form.

Meanwhile, I find the portfolios a wonderful way to present my best prints to those who wonder what sort of photography I do. Prints of interest have a way of getting personally matted, framed and signed for future gifts.

My best gift was received when I asked my parents to create an album of our family's photos for my 40th birthday (20 years ago), with accompanying explanations. I asked my dad to write a letter to me for the album sharing some of his remembrances of the people in the album. I also had him take me on a tour of our hometown so that I could take pictures of every house and neighborhood where he, my mom and our family lived. This was done none too soon, as my dad now has Alzheimer's and could no longer have shared this precious information. I need to get that album reproduced...thanks for the reminder, Mike.

[matt stott]

Wow. Thank you Mike, as I look though the viewfinder of my late grandmother's canon point and shoot and realize, at last, why she cut the heads off our family portraits for the last 40 years. Damn parallax lines and damn fine memories.

Matt

[wtlloyd]

One hell of a pair of posts, Mike.

Regarding the portfolio you left behind, perhaps 'twere best left so...

In my case, it was my one and only ever completed stained/leaded glass piece that I left behind. I never had to ask for it back, because as I walked away from the final hostilities, it came at me launched from the second floor window.

My friends joked for weeks...

[John Camp]

In an off-blog exchange, I suggested to Mike that one way of trying to ensure the survival not of photographs, but of images, would be to take the most valuable images of your own, and from the past, scan them, print them with a good pigment printer on carefully chosen paper, and then have them bound by a book binder. I suspect that starting from scratch, and buying the scanner, printer, paper, any necessary software could cost less than $1,000 -- I'm referring now to relatively small prints, done on a smaller Epson printer but with the latest pigmented inks,and laid out with something like Photoshop Elements. Of course, most people here probably have most of the necessary machinery already (printer and software, anyway. Scanners, I think, are fairly cheap.)

Note than I am talking about saving the *images*, not the original photos. You can do what you wish to save them, but many of them can not be saved, long term. Ordinary drugstore color photos, poorly done, seem to eat themselves in a few decades, and you would need an expensive conservator to save them, if that's even possible.

But, if they were scanned, printed with good ink, and then bound in a leather-covered book that would be valuable as an artifact in its own right, it's quite possible that you would produce something that would be around in several hundred years. If I were to do this, and I might, for my grandchildren, I might even donate a couple copies to the state historical society. If the binding was good enough, I bet they'd take it. And once on their climage-controlled shelves, a carefully made book could last indefinitely.

JC

[Ed]

Ah, the only thing to truly safeguard one's survival is to be remembered. In that case an estate or loving family can be of help. Making a name for yourself can also help, but fame is more relative then relatives. But what if non of your work survives, would that be a tragidy, I make pictures for the here and now, and if someone thinks the here and now is wearth preserving, there are millions of pictures in the vaults of Flickr, Facebook, Piccasa, the Microsoft photo collection and Getty images......as long as power runs through these computers, they will be preserved (or at least they should be). I think sites like Flickr and Piccasa don't know the treasures they have ammased and I think these sites should be currated. They have become the digital memory of our planet....and they cannot afford total amnesia.....

Greetings, Ed

[Kelvin]

Hi there Ctein, thank you for publishing these thoughtful articles about archiving our photo prints. I too followed the road of archival permanence obsession when I was cutting my teeth on darkroom fine printing - following the road of double weight fibre paper, fancy print washers, hypo clearers, selenium toners and so on. Over twenty years later I can count on both hands the number of prints that went through that process that I still treasure and hang on the wall. I think the rest eventually fell by the wayside with moving house several times.

I like to be a bit more philosophical about it these days. If my photos disappear, then so be it - they had their creative moment and their glory for a little while. Perhaps I can take a leaf out of the conceptual artist's book and think that maybe it's not the photo itself that's important, but what I am trying to do with it. They are born, they take a life of their own, we set them free into the world, they eventually fade away and perish, and if we are lucky they will leave some kind of influence and legacy.

[Don Craig]

Very good series Mike. The archiving problem is hard, from the Library of Congress on down. A couple of years ago I donated a large print (96 x 42 inches) to my then-employer. We permanently spray-glued it to the drywall in a colleague's office - it could be destroyed, but not moved elsewhere without a sawzall. The company was sold, the building vacated, and the print now hangs in an empty office building, awaiting the next economic cycle. I think of it as tossing a message in a bottle into the ocean, artist's statement and all.

[Zaan]

Thank you for this article. It is why I come here everyday. This discussion made me wonder about digital though, and the added problems that go with that. Will there be software that can open a cr2 file 100 years from now? Will someone even know how to extract pictures from my hard drive after I (and software vendors alike) have taken so many pains to secure and hide everything from thieves and other enemies of privacy.

[Hudson]

I have started putting captions on my digital images, just add a 1/2 inch to the bottom of the image and start typing.

http://hudsonl.rrpicturearchives.net/showpicture.aspx?id=1904403

-Hudson

[The Lazy Aussie]

In Graves' I Claudius, the Emperor decides of his historical record to "just leave them lying about", reasoning that that gave them a better chance of surviving than some official record deposit.

I wonder what will happen to all the flickr tags. I think the same will apply. Leave them lying about in a few places.

[Marc Rochkind]

After the 1993 bombing that destroyed much of one tower's underground garage and a hotel, it was hardly a safe place for storing valuables in a vault.

[Chris]

"Charlie's picture doesn't do well in this respect. Presumably aspen trees will still look the same a hundred years from now. Then again, maybe not"

It's interesting that you mentioned this, Mike. On Saturday, one of the local news stations had a piece on aspen decline in Colorado due to climate change. The online version can be found here:

http://www.9news.com/rss/story.aspx?storyid=182324

While it's human to assume that landscape photography will always be as it is because of the slow rate of change relative to our short time on this rock, the reality is that our world is constantly changing both because of and in spite of us.

And while we tend to think of the geologic pace of change of the land around us, it's amazing how quickly it can happen, too. In the span of my lifetime (which numbers only 30 years) the character of Rocky Mountain National Park has completely changed as a result of the devastation of the pine bark beetle.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ghosstrider/3961964009/sizes/o/in/photostream/

I have slides of this same area taken 10 years ago that are completely free of the brown of all the beetle kill trees. The west side of the park is even worse. The area around Grand Lake is so brown that I rarely venture there anymore.

One can argue until he or she is blue in the face about who or what is driving climate change. The fact remains that it is part of the cycle of our lives. Shots of large stands of golden aspen may be as interesting in 100 years as shots of treeless images of Georgetown, CO are today (the hills were completely clear cut for fuel and building supplies during Colorado's mining boom):

http://digital.denverlibrary.org/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/p15330coll22&CISOPTR=3663&CISOBOX=1&REC=2

I think that all your advice is equally important for landscape photography as every other genre of photography.

[Andrew Molitor]

I've been piling up prints myself, and FINALLY got around to starting to trim them up and stuff them into albums. I went nuts trying to find an actual paper photo album -- most everything has these terrible plastic envelopes (which, I know, will do a better job of preserving!) which I hate. I finally found kolo.com which sells archival albums with cardstock pages and photo corners. Now I'm living in the 1920s again, and I've got a home for at least one copy of each of my prints!

[Craig]

While the post's title is specific to inkjet prints, I can't help but wonder what happens to all of the millions (billions?) of digital photos stored only on a computer. Will anyone ever find them, or value them?

Since I'm a photographer, I'd like many of my photographs to be passed down as a part of my legacy. I have numerous hard drives full of images, ranging from raw to finished. But, once I'm gone, I doubt if anyone would have the time, training or inclination to go searching through the files to find my favorites. I suspect the drives will get stuffed into a box and stored until they're obsolete, then they'll be tossed out.

To help protect my legacy, I make prints of my favorite images. They may still be stuffed into boxes, or become fadeed or torn or get tossed out, but at least someone will see them first. And, I'm pretty sure the prints won't become an obsolete technolgy.

[The Grumpster]

Sound and practical advice here Mike, but survival is such a transient and relative thing. Specifically, how long must something survive in order for it to count? Longer than our lifetime? Longer than our children’s? While entirely plausible that a photo taken today might survive a hundred years or more, is it realistic to assume that survival of said photo for something a bit longer, say 1000 years, is even possible, let alone probable? How many works of art from 1000 years ago survive today, expressed as a percentage of the sum total created back then? And if 1000 years seems too easy, what about 10,000 years or 100,000 years?

My point is that beyond some length of time (and I don’t claim to know what that length is), survival is essentially impossible. Indeed, this raises an even greater philosophical question, that of whether anything can survive in an absolute sense. The best and brightest (of whom I am not one) generally agree that the universe is ever expanding, ultimately to become infinitely large and infinitely cold, effectively ceasing to exist altogether. In the face of that rather depressing “reality”, survival seems to be a moot point.

From my own perspective, I simply try to enjoy that which exists today, knowing full well that neither I nor my work will last forever. And to the marketeers who would like us to believe that insert-favorite-cliché-here is/are forever, I say forever is an entirely temporary phenomenon.

[Tim]

Continuing the `don't sweat it' angle, think of it as memetic evolution with a wide-pass acceptance filter.

Obvious example: consider the relationship between Atget and Abbott who took *some* of his collection.

[Rob Atkins]

E.O.Hoppé, a new - to me - photographer to discover and learn about. Thank you Mike.

My wife showed me some prints she found in her family's archives, one of a rather distinctive man in a top hat, smiling at the camera. I recognized the person immediately: Al Smith, Governor of New York State in the twenties.

[Nolan Hester]

Ultimately, this is why I love TOP: It transcends the technical with something like wisdom.

"...Personally, I have at least a sentimental regard for those humans of the future whose attics we are stocking with the work we do now. "

Thanks Mike!

[Mike Johnston]

Hudson,
Good practice. You probably realize how very eager railroad buffs are for pictures to be identified!

Mike

[Hugh Alison]

Even worse....

108 of 253 episodes from the first six years of Doctor Who are missing. They were wiped (or "junked") by the BBC during the 1960s and 1970s for economic and space-saving reasons.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Who_missing_episodes)

It gets even weirder...

"LONG-lost Doctor Who episodes thought to be hidden away in Zimbabwe may never be recovered because despot Robert Mugabe hates the UK. BBC investigators believe the troubled nation holds some of the early episodes of the cult series which are still missing. But tyrant President Mugabe has banned the Beeb from setting foot in his country."

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/showbiz/tv/article2255640.ece

http://img.thesun.co.uk/multimedia/archive/00737/dialect_737444a.jpg

[erlik]

Mike, I've got an uneasy feeling that you can sum up both of the articles in one sentence: Life's a bitch and then you die. :)

I think Richard has got a very good point about digital. The sheer number of photos taken is overwhelming. Just take a look at Picasa albums: "me at the beach" and pfrrrrt! - 399 photos. Facebook profiles - new profile photos almost every day. The phrase "ephemerality of photography" has taken a quantum leap upwards. :)

[Mike Johnston]

"While entirely plausible that a photo taken today might survive a hundred years or more, is it realistic to assume that survival of said photo for something a bit longer, say 1000 years, is even possible, let alone probable? How many works of art from 1000 years ago survive today, expressed as a percentage of the sum total created back then?"

Grumpster,
Consider, though, that at some point, age itself becomes a preservative—at some point the survivors begin to be honored just *because* they're old. (Search this site for "trough of no value.")

Consider, too, all of the major artwork that has survived the millennia. Not everything, by any means, but not a trivial amount, either. And art historians keep track of the losses--you can Google "Lost Artworks" for a listing of major pieces "that credible sources indicate once existed but that cannot be accounted for in museums or private collections or are known to have been destroyed or neglected through ignorance and lack of connoisseurship."

Mike

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Okay, I'm amused -- my current count gives six "featured comments" and no regular comments :-) . Apparently this topic is bringing out the best in us (or at least others)!

[Mike Johnston]

David,
That's just an artifact of my working method and an accident of timing on your part. What I do is read through all the comments first, moderating and editing as I go along, during the course of which I might extract a few to "Feature," and then I post all of them--minus the ones I featured. If you sign in at just the right time in the process, as you just did, you'll see featured comments but no other comments posted.

Mike

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Ah well. It was amusing while it lasted.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

Some of the considerations that make survival of physical artwork for 1000 years very very problematic do not apply to digital media. Yes, other limiting considerations apply there, and it's easy to describe scenarios where digital artwork doesn't survive either. Still, the important thing is, the rules change. Predictions based on the old rules will be wrong.

[robert]

Thanks Mike great coverage on a much neglected topic. Maybe the N.Y.Times will pick it up and spread the word.

[Tony]

It seems like a lot of time and resources could go down this rabbit warren for the sake of perceived loss. It is tricky though, because there are occasions where it has proven to be warranted… but mostly that isn’t the case I suspect. I think the problem is deciding what to put the effort into and for the other 99% to be able to “Don’t seat it”

I mainly take photos of my daughter. She would probably prefer I play with her rather than spend my time organising our memories/stuff (being a bit obsessive, it could easily get out of hand and dominate my attention) but at the same time a few special ones should be preserved for later, hard to know which ones will be important at this end of the timeline though. Bit of a balance I think.

I think it is OK to let most stuff slide away in time, today is unlikely to be important tomorrow.

[Robin Dreyer]

Mike,

I'm not adding anything to the discussion, I'm just posting to say that you are a fine, fine writer and this is a excellent rumination on this fascinating subject.

[Robin Dreyer]

But I will add this, from Ken Kesey via Tom Wolfe (Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test): "All art is temporary. Even the Mona Lisa is fading."

[MHMG]

We have all been discussing one boundary condition for the intrinsic value of photographic prints or digital images, i.e., the premise that they could conceivably last in perpetuity, or at the very least have enduring value that deserves a whole hearted effort to pass on generation to generation. Let us now consider the other boundary condition. Since nothing lasts forever or as Mike suggested in a devil's advocate kind of way "don't sweat it", I therefore draw camera viewfinder to my eye, compose the frame, burn the scene into my own memory to last my lifetime, but then I stop... I don't squeeze off the shot... because the recorded image won't last forever, so it doesn't really doesn't matter! It's all an intellectual construct.

It seems that the practice of photography provides an underlying promise of freezing a moment in time forever yet is fallible in so many ways. OK, so maybe a photograph is truly suitable only as an instant replay for friends and family Beyond that, just erase the image and move on! This is a very logical argument about the folly of this game, but my instinct still tells me photography is a better use of my time than many other things I could do. So, I keep making photographs, and I keep doing my best to preserve them.

[Dennis Ng]

I still repeat my suggestion to have a multi-region digital archive paid by the owner or sponsors of the photos for long keeping. Sort of flickr/pbase with a thinking of long time survival in mind.

[Doug C]

I would hope that Jacques Lowe's work is not lost, didn't he make prints, get them published or at least get them in people's hands?
I know I have at least 75,000 prints out there that people have valued enough to buy, maybe not the ones I would have been my first choice, but they bought what meant something to them and hopefully some will survive. And they are not "easy-keepers" they are big, four feet long and longer contact prints.
Sadly they are color prints from negatives. They may last longer than ink-jet or maybe not. I don't think the tests answer that question, do they?
Can these ink-jet prints last over 100 years? I hope so. I do put some out in the world. But why would they? It seems to me that it was a complete accident that B&W prints from the first hundred years of photography lasted well and that color prints from the 60's and 70's are all gone.
Have we learned anything?

[Stephen Price]

Jeff's suggestion of self-publishing books resonates with me--it's much easier than, say, producing fine-art grade prints and having them bound in leather. And you can easily make a bunch and give them to sundry young relatives.

But it brings up another question: what is the longevity of the cheap photo books from Blurb, Lulu, MPIX, etc.? What happens to the ink/toner when the book is left closed at the bottom of a big box? I've seen plenty of cases when low-quality laser printing peels off on the facing page.

Are there online publishers that offer archival quality books?

[James]

Not being a really good photographer myself, I'm never going to be troubled with "My best pictures 1965 - ?" archive taking up more than a slim A4 portfolio, but the idea is something I have been working on in a broader sense.

My life is not defined by physical images, but there are very many things that I would wish anyone coming after me to have undamaged and recognise that those things were important to me - books, papers, recordings and so on. I bought a couple of years ago (and it wasn't cheap, just under £2000) a high quality fire and waterproof filing system. The container is about 5 feet tall and nearly 3 wide. That's the archive of my life, and those close to me know it. My only worry is dampness but so far it has not been an issue.

[Juan Rizzo]

And now, for something completely different... yet another example of the 'don't sweat it' attitude. In (the great TV documentary)"Monty Python: Almost the Truth" Terry Gilliam tells the story of how he had to rescue MPFC's tapes from the BBC (about to go the way of the moon landing tapes). Now *that* would have been 'no fun anymore'!

[Mark Francis F. Lopez]

Fantastic articles Mike - spurs me to start going through my photos and pick out ones to print, annotate and organize; that is, as soon as I finish selecting which among the thousands of our wedding pictures our photographer should include in the wedding album. I don't think my wife is going to take too kindly to me creating collections of photos of old office mates while our wedding shots lie forlornly neglected in a corner of the hard drive!

[Steve Smith]

Will there be software that can open a cr2 file 100 years from now? Will someone even know how to extract pictures from my hard drive after I (and software vendors alike) have taken so many pains to secure and hide everything from thieves and other enemies of privacy.

I don't think it's a case of 'will someone know how to?' more likely will anyone be interested? The analogy I always use is that of clearing the house of a deceased relative. If you find an old photo album, the chances are that you will open it up and have a look through it and usually someone will decide to keep hold of it. I do't think the same could be said for someone finding a few CDs.

[Sean]

From Lin Din's poem: Recent Archeo News

20th February 3006-Ancient toilet Discovered in Boston, lid missing

22 January 3006-Post modern poem found in Dogs grave, tucked in anus.

I've got got me a dog

[Lynn]

Great article Mike. Family relationships can also have a big effect. In my wife's family one sibling elected to take for safekeeping all the family photos (mainly Kodachromes and old b&w negs) after both parents died. Only problem is, that was years ago and no-one's seen them since. There was mention once of "copying the worthwhile ones" but I don't think they have a scanner. The more years pass, the more difficult it gets. Scanning them would be a very big job.

NB. You might be interested to know the BBC produced a fine Stephen Poliakoff drama called Shooting The Past, about the sometimes surprising value of old, archived photographs http://www.amazon.co.uk/Shooting-Past-BBC-Lindsay-Duncan/dp/B0000AISIF. Well worth a look if you haven't seen it before.

[Mike Johnston]

"I've got got me a dog"

Did your wife approve this comment? [g]

Mike

[Will Whitaker]

Entropy is a bitch.

[Tony]

I've been having a form of Archive Panic myself recently (well, the last year). I've been scanning and sorting and cleaning up the best I could dozens of shoe boxes of my mom's from the last 60 years. Fortunately she took meticulous notes on what was where, and what she didn't know I was able to figure out ("Lets see, I was wearing a Mt St Helen's eruption shirt, so it has to be after 1980, and I was wearing the same shirt with a Pac Man hat - meaning that has to be 1982!") - but while the archeology was fun, I cant see anyone else doing it.

It's been a a year of intensive work, and I cant see anyone without a vested interest in it taking that kind of time. Hell, as it is the photos from the 50s and 60s are a chore to get through even for me.

So yeah, while I understand that my art is ephemeral, I'm at least going to write the dates and a quick description on the back of my printed photos to give Future People some kind of context.

[Sean]

Did your wife approve this comment? [g]

Sadly no, She's too busy looking after
my post modern poem

[Tyler Westcott]

You make several excellent points, but the one that resonates with me the most is that I too (heeding the lesson of Mr. Cramer) should sell several hundred prints... in the name of preservation. ;-) (if only it were that easy).

[John Gillooly]

Mike, I have a specific question regarding an interesting collection of photographs. About 35 years ago, my father, a photographer, was given a box of bw negatives with corresponding contact prints.

The images are all from 1945-1947 in Seoul and Japan - probably 300-400 images. Almost all of the prints have detailed, handwritten info on the back.

Being 39 years old, I am also unfamiliar with the negative format? I originally thought they were 6x9, but the negatives do not fit in 120/220 sleeves and they seem a bit wider than a 2x3 ratio? The negatives are 2 1/4 x 4 1/4. The contact prints are all individual black and white prints with the word VELOX on the back. They were printed at Bromfield Camera in Boston in the late 1940s. almost all of it is in perfect condition.

There are a few images of a LT. Col. from the US military and they are almost surely his images. There is also a photograph, along with address, of what is probably his house in a suburb of Boston.

I may try to track this family down - this guy is almost certainly gone as he looked at least 30 in the images in 1947.

My question. Given the recent thread and the wish that folks would document the who, what, when, where on prints so that images remained important, is there an outlet for images like these? A collection of medium format images documenting people and places in Korea before the start of the Korean War, with quite detailed documentation. Where would you start?

Thanks.

John Gillooly
Boston