NEWS: Somebody Else's History

As for "found art" - I do think we run the risk of losing this stuff long term. Even if people back their shit up to CD or DVD-ROM and even if 100 years from now people have the drives to actually read that data, there really is no guarantee that the media itself will not degraded into unusability. Many CD-ROM formulations start to crap out in a matter of months, let alone decades. I personally use archival-quality CDs, but even these are no guarantee that they'll remain stable through the eons.

Right.

But pictures are the sorts of things that people tend to value, so I would imagine that important pictures will be backed up on to the latest and greatest media possible for many people. People will also continue getting hard copies of pictures, too, at least in the immediate future.

And, even in this case, the individual notes that some of the pictures couldn't be recovered on some of the groupings. The issue isn't necessarily about being able to recover everything - only a few bits and pieces here and there need survive to put together something compelling.

Editted to add because I didn't see the post at the end of the last page:
Is it necessarily that we're losing pictures that would otherwise be around in hard copy, or that people are trading pictures back and forth that the wouldn't have taken if they had to worry about paying for film and developing costs?

[Edited on Oct 28, 2005 by emperorreagan]

Those photos are beautiful. Thanks for the link.

The issue as I see it (not sure if you were addressing me) is that we've gone from having photos on a tangible, optical medium in which the same "technology" has been used for about a century to an intangible medium where the "technology" is changing much more rapidly. The media storage we see today stands a very high chance of not existing in any form even 25 years from now. The cards that are currently used in the cameras - Compact Flash, MMC, SD, etc. - most likely will not be accesible 100 years from now. Additionally, those formats are not used in the same way that film has been used for the past 100 years anyway - cards are a temporary storage device. The "permanent" storage is usually either a hard drive, or in some cases CD-ROMs. But I'm here to tell you - if you think the average American is backing up all his photos to archival quality CD-ROMs that will last the next 100 years, you're absolutely fucking dreaming. I'm a semi-pro photographer and even I don't always back stuff up unless it's paid-for. In the case of film, just the process of taking photos immediately results in a "backup" of the print - something that could be leveraged optically (without knowing RAW algorithms and so on) relatively easily even by some future society hundreds of years from now, assuming the film is stored properly.

If you look at this case and try to draw a parallel with what might happen in the future you're talking about a guy going into a pawn shop, finding a camera with film in it and with additional canisters of film in the box, running it through a process that's remain relatively unchanged for almost 100 years, revealing these photos. So being able to do this in the future would presume a few things: A) that the digital cameras of today are worth enough that they'll end up in pawn shops and B) the storage media would end up stored with these cameras. Unfortunately in our consumerist society the lifespan of your average camera is about a year, maybe two. The cameras usually end up broken and are simply thrown away. The media storage itself is re-usable, so it will usually be used in the new camera that replaces the old. So even assuming that the old camera still works and ends up in a garage sale and eventually a pawn shop, there will most likely be no media with it to "discover" photos from.

A more likely scenario for the future is that people will be resurrecting old hard drives from discarded computers and get hard drives from there. But again, currently people go through computers at an alarming rate and the old ones generally do not end up being collectors items sitting in pawn shop windows, waiting to be mined. They end up in landfills with the rest of the trash.

thats is awesome

Wow, this is awesome. Thanks for sharing!