Memory of the future: Paper, Disc, Cloud...Photography in search of a future!

(Part of  "the contemporary meaning of photography"series)

For over more than its 180 first years the representation of photography has been done on a solid 2D support like paper, cardboard, glass, etc. Today it seems to be no really relevant to show our pictures that way only. Instead we are using on screen devices that for most of them give us a very handy and high resolution representation of the image. The problem with this is that those devices dont really sustain the picture permanently as it use to be in the past. So for any archival purpose or future reference you will need another support (digital or not) to preserve your photographs.

Preserving images doesn't matter if you are not interested to keep souvenirs or picture reminders from your past. In that case future access to digital memory or digital memory fading are not a real preoccupation. Sorry to confirm you this fact that can be observed for the immense majority of the pictures taken today. People in our present societies have a tendency to obliterate the past and are not interest anymore with history. The question of connection (Internet) is now essential to every photographing today devices. Many traditional camera manufacturers are finding very hard to understand that very basic fact of our consumer world.

The "consumer" societies as we are experiencing today is not really prepared and not really interest to stock over information that will seem obsolete in a very short term. So we are actually dropping or flushing most of our media production. And more important even when we intend to preserve some of it, it is only for a very short period of time.

The other problem of photographic preservation is the selection of what we think it is wort to do so. Because of the outstanding amount of imagery we are constantly producing in this digital age it start to be painfully annoying to try to choose and to classify our photographs.

In my sense the only approach of preserving pictures on a long term (at least for few generations) is to complete the entire cycle of producing photography. In simple term doing a print copy of your picture as we use to do for the first 200 years for the medium. So (ironicaly) the print may eventually win over disc, tape, drive,  cloud ... after all!

                                                                                     

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