How's This for a Preservation Scheme?

Buy three boxes.*

When you get a great portfolio-worthy shot, make three prints.

Put one in a box at your house.

Put the second in a box at your friend's house.

Send the third to a relative to put in a box in their house.

When the boxes fill up, buy three more boxes.

In the immortal words of the third fiddle, viola.

Of course, I don't do this, so I can't claim that this is a feasible backup system. (It seems to me that one of the crucial tests of a backup system is, does the person who's talking about it actually do it? If he doesn't, it's a black mark against the system right there.)

Mike

*I like 8x10x1 boxes because you can put them upright on a bookshelf like a book. And who doesn't have bookshelves somewhere in the house? Can't be said of any friend of mine. Plus, 8x10s are scan-able on flatbed scanners.

P.S. Here's what's wrong with this plan. You'd send your pictures to your friend and your relative, but 1) they'd show them to other people, eventually crimping and dog-earing them and getting them dirty; 2) they'd like some of them and want to frame them for the mountain cabin or Junior's dorm room, or they'd take a few of them out of the box to take over and show another friend or send to Aunt May, and the pictures would never find their way back to the box; or c) you'd get a call 11 years from now (which would also be 10 years and five months since you last added a print to their box) and it would be your friend or relative saying, "I've got this box with 23 of your pictures in it and I have no idea where it came from. So I'm sending it back to you. Here's the tracking number...."

Oh well, on second thought, never mind.

I tell ya, the only way to preserve your work is to be famous. Then everybody wants it, there will be plenty of copies around, and people who own the prints will take care of them. The rest of us are probably screwed.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Dave Levingston: "I've been working for more than three years on what I've been calling my 'Immortality Project.' It involves making sets of prints to be boxed and given to various friends and family for safekeeping.

"There's even one museum that has agreed to take a box.

"Originally the plan was for each box to hold about 300 prints of my best photos. After working on it for a while I realized that I would have to be immortal to complete the project. (About 20 boxes of various sizes from 17x22 to 8.5x11.) So, I've scaled it back to 100 prints. After three and a half years I've printed about 35 of them.

"I might get the 100 done before I die or, worse, go blind. And the hope is that someday 50 years after I've left this life, someone, somewhere will open one of those boxes and enjoy what I put in it. That's about as good as we can hope for, I think."

Shaun: "Printing up a self-published book is another way to go. Of course fine art print fidelity isn't in it, but it is an inexpensive way to put your best photographs in one place which can be easily distributed and passed down through a few generations. Leave a copy laying around and those photographs that are normally hiding in archival boxes will actually be seen."

Comments

[Yonatan Katznelson]

I like the three boxes plan, but where to store them...?

How about one box at home, one in a safety deposit box and one in the just-in-case-the-pentagon-invades-my-state bunker under the garage.

[Marcus Peddle]

I have digital files on my hard drive and a backup drive which sits next to the computer. I'm covered in case of hard drive failure but a fire will wipe out not only my digital photos but also the folders full of film and prints in the spare room. However, I think that at least a few of my photos will survive disaster and my death. I had an exhibition late last year and sold several prints to a gallery owner, an art collector, and a couple of friends in other countries. I also gave away a couple to people who helped me with the exhibition. Those photos are signed, dated, in very good frames, and they should last a very long time. I like to think that because they now have value as art (he says humbly as a not-famous person) they might be carefully preserved, even if it's not by me.

[John Camp]

There's a certain amount of vanity in all of this, isn't there? I have photos of some of my ancestors taken in the late 19th Century, but haven't looked at them for a long time, and I'm not particularly curious about them, either, because there's very little context to them. I'm looking at the faces of people I never knew, and landscapes I couldn't identify if they were't identified on the back of the print. I don't even know if my kids would be interested in inheriting them.

When I lived in Pasadena, Ca., I'd go down to the huge Rose Bowl flea market every month, and there you could find quite literally thousands of photos taken during World War II, some of them quite good, that were apparently sold or discarded by the picture-taker's descendants -- and the war only ended 70 years ago.

I think most "memory" photos are usually good for a lifetime -- they preserve memories of friendships and events that will be meaningless to people two generations forward. And what will landscape photos mean? I've looked at lots of them, from the 19th century, and again, they're largely meaningless -- landscapes change, photography gets better. Some news (war) photography persists, but if it's valuable, it will be preserved by people who are paid to do that (the Smithsonian.) Few kinds of photographs, IMHO, will really persist in the wild, outside of institutions: portraits of people who are famous for other reasons than photography; photos of famous events; and the very tip-top pinnacle of fine art. How tip-top pinnacle? I suspect that Ansel Adams probably made a dozen or so photos that will persist in the wild a hundred years past his death.

So for most of us, the task is to preserve our own photos until we die, which simply means transferring them from one media to the next one, a few times in our life. Not an onerous task, really. How long does it take to back up a 64GB thumbdrive to a new one, every five years or so? After we die, our kids might look at them from time to time, but the grandchildren? And the great-grandchildren? I think the end of most of our photographic efforts is the local landfill.

The thought kind of depresses me, but I think that's the way the world is, has been, and will be even more so in the future. My attitude toward this kind of thing is, not to worry about it too much.

[Eric]

Here's my scheme:

After I've made my first cut, I upload the raw file, the XMP file, and the screen sized JPEG to Amazon Glacier. A penny per gig per month. My monthly bill is about $4. That means I'm storing 400 gig on Amazon. That's a lot of photos.

I buy drives and external enclosures and hook them up via USB. I make a copy of my photos to these disks. I don't do it as faithfully as I do my Amazon backup, but over time, I eventually have my photos in three places: my disk in my computer, a disk that's disconnected from my computer, and Amazon.

I make prints. I store them in an archival box. That's my 4th copy.

If my house burns down, I have Amazon. My digital negatives are actually safer than my carefully processed B&W negatives. I've been digital since buying the Canon 5D in 2006. I have all my important images from the last 9 years on Amazon. For about the price of a happy meal.

I also have some super important images on a USB drive in my safe deposit box at my bank, but if I mention that, you'd think I'm really paranoid. :)

Eric

[Nick]

Who are we preserving these photos for exactly? My backups are basically for my own access, I don't have much expectation that anyone will want my photos after i'm gone. Given the number of millions of photos uploaded per second to facebook/flickr etc, I'm quite certain that 'Get Famous' is the only way to ensure both preservation, and that anyone will actually care enough anyway!

Maybe my direct family will want to hold on to a few, but surely within a generation or two it doesn't matter too much anymore. Even then, probably it's only the portfolio 'best' shots, not the thousands and thousands of second rate ones.

[Dave Levingston]

I've been working for more than 3 years on what I've been calling my "Immortality Project." It involves making sets of prints to be boxed and given to various friends and family for safekeeping. There's even one museum that has agreed to take a box.

Originally the plan was for each box to hold about 300 prints of my best photos. After working on it for a while I realized that I would have to be immortal to complete the project. (About 20 boxes of various sizes from 17x22 to 8.5x11) So, I've scaled it back to 100 prints. After 3 1/2 years I've printed about 35 of them. I might get the 100 done before I die or, worse, go blind.

And the hope is that someday 50 years after I've left this life, someone, somewhere will open one of those boxes and enjoy what I put in it. That's about as good as we can hope for, I think.

[Jim Bullard]

Better idea: Make three prints on 8½x11 paper and put them in Itoya portfolios. Keep one at home and farm the other two out to your designated archivists. The folios will fit a bookshelf and can be looked at like a book without mangling the prints. In discussing with my wife recently how I should preserve my best work, that is exactly what we decided to begin doing. The other copies will probably be sent to our two children.

[Julian]

The belief that my pictures might change the world and influence future generations was an affliction of my youth. M-discs, boxed prints in deposit boxes, that's all too much weight for my thoroughly average talent to bear. If my work is worthwhile it'll be preserved by other people after I'm dead, like other art is. If our house burns down I'll get to start afresh.

[Robert Gordon]

We photographers certainly are a worrying lot.

[Mim]

I'm (very slowly) working on Blurb books - grouped by year, trip, subject, whatever. Some are "family memory" oriented, others are more "photography hobby."

I print a few copies of each for family members, and figure there's a good chance they'll survive along with the old family photo albums. Since the oldest surviving family prints in those albums go back 130 years, I figure I've got a fighting chance my books will be around for a while at least.

Quality wise the books are OK but not great, but my preferred alternative (photo quality A3 prints and finding someone to bind them for me) is currently beyond my resources. I might yet manage that yet if I win the lottery!

[Eolake]

My friends have book shelves too. But I've realized that this is not true of a big part of civilized population. I've seen it when visiting others in the neighborhood watch scheme. Or once I sublet an apartment in Edinburg. Owned by a music teacher, so one would suppose an educated woman. But I realized after a while: not a book shelf anywhere in the apartment! It was so alien to me it was like finding myself on Mars.
What do intelligent people *do* in their spare time without books? Though I'll admit to watch carefully selected TV via Tivo, there's just not enough.

(The owner was rather difficult. A shame, for I met her when I moved away, and she was tall, and sooo gorgeous. Sigh.)
(Oh, by the way, I did find one book. In the drawer under her bed, a book with photos of statues, male nude statues.)

[Robert Harshman]

Everything turns to dust at some point and is forgotten, get over it. Back to the beginning again. Eventually no one will be known or remembered, so take some solace that we are all in the same boat, not a one of us will be known.

Live you life now, and make memories that you remember.

[Dennis]

The physical print in the nice box seems the way to go. Every digital device or analog for that matter has its flaws or weakness. And let's be honest, a thousand years? That can only be magic. Any one have Harry Potter telephone number?

[Rod Thompson]

Why not facebook. Apparently it still works when your dead!

[beuler]

"I tell ya, the only way to preserve your work is to be famous." Nail hit squarely on the head Mike. Most of us only need the archival duration of our allotted 15 minutes.

[Len Kowitz]

Exactly Right!
My recurring dream...I come back to my house after having died a year earlier only to find that wife and children have put all the boxes of my photographs out on the curb waiting for the trash pick up the next morning,
In the rain.

[Jake]

Better make that four; one for the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[Dennis Ng]

I start to post my photos on Facebook for my relatives to download and print. Anyway just family photos decades old.

[Bernard]

Well, hum, it's not "viola", it's "voilà" (French for "here it is")... And the fiddle analogy doesn't work so well anymore.

Cheers