All your photos will disappear (yes, really)

Tuesday 16 August 2022, 16:32 by Elvira Smit | 4,125 views | 4 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

My grandmother has a shoebox containing her old photos. It is a manageable little stack, and fun to look through. But what will happen to our images? We take too many, keep everything and lose track. A recipe for trouble.

Until the late 1990s, I had my rolls of film developed at Hema. I made a scrapbook with some of them. The remaining photos are in a box within easy reach.

But then.

The digital revolution

In early 2000, I got a digital camera. One with only a few pixels. What followed was five years of digital photography disappearing into the void. Probably because of a crashed computer.

Anyway, from 2005 onwards I have images again, folders full of them. Those folders get bigger every year: it is not just the file size, the number of photos is growing too. Ask me to find one specific photo and I will be busy for a while. I have too many images, images without context.

And you probably do too.

There is a good chance that your recent photos are only on your laptop and phone. Perhaps you used to share your images on Hyves, then on Facebook, and now on Instagram. And soon on another platform. Perhaps you even have a website to prevent all those platform migrations (like me).

Your images lead a digital life. If you print 1% of all your images, that is already a huge number. You only look at most of the photos you take at the time itself.

Search task

Try finding a photo from your 2013 holiday showing you with a travel companion. How long do you think that will take? It says something about the state of your archive.

If we cannot even make sense of our own mess of images, what are we leaving future generations with? All our images are full of context that is only present with the people in the photo or the person who took it: who is in the photo, and when and where it was taken.

A good example is Ernst Lalleman's project. He asks viewers to help search for these people from The Hague, no one knows anymore who they are.

What you can do

There are, of course, ways to reduce the chance of being forgotten. Make something that looks valuable. Something that future generations would be sorry to throw away. Have a nice printed book or scrapbook made, or frame a photo. Write on the back what it is, where it is and, above all, who is in it.

Or simply accept that everything is temporary, and that your images are only truly valuable to you. Some of them, anyway. Even then, the same applies: make something of them. Scroll through your archive, pick out the gems and learn about your own photographic preferences at the same time if you play this game.

What remains of my images

I have no illusions about it: I think all my images will disappear. I even dare say that the photos in my grandmother's shoebox have a better chance of surviving than my entire digital archive, which grows by around 10,000 photos every year.

Well, except perhaps two photos:

Ironically, these two were made using an old-fashioned technique, namely the collodion process, also known as tin type or wet plate. Here you can read how that photo was made, and by whom.

I still need to write the year and my name on the back.

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