A lifetime of photography with no images?

With the onslaught of digital capture and its inherent storage problems, a thought recently crossed my mind that may be a look into the future of our industry. More and more today I hear of the horrors of trying to file digital images and of the growing trend towards photography and especially digital photography becoming a disposable commodity. Lately, in discussions with a member of the art department of a major retailer, the subject of image storage came up and the response from the client staggered me. Their position was that as long as the edited image was available to them until after the ad had run, they could care less about it after that! Since they would have hard copies of the completed ad for reference and since the shot was never likely to be reused, they had no interest in it being archived. This attitude was not only directed towards their advertisements, but also towards all of their POP and catalogue images. Now if one looks to other outlets, this idea holds true almost across the board. Almost any type of reproduced image is disposable as far as the client is concerned. Once it is printed/published, they have a permanent record and generally speaking, no further use for the image itself.

If you consider various market trends outside of photography, the move is towards a disposable product. For example, milk has not been delivered in glass containers for decades; even the one gallon/4litre plastic jugs are a thing of the past. More and more, packaging is intended to be disposed of after use and that packaging is becoming more and more utilitarian in many cases. Throughout our society, products are more often than not intended to have a very limited lifespan. From the automobiles we drive to the homes we live in things are not intended to last forever any longer. When I started in photography in the 1960’s, a photographer’s life’s work was always treated as if it would supercede their tenure on this earth. Hence, from wedding photographers to leading photojournalists and social documentarians, their collective work was stored and managed for posterity. Is this still the case today? If as appears to be the attitude of at least some buyers, the images have no use after printing and if the current trend towards WFH continues to grow, why is storage even a concern? Stock photographers may be an exception, but beyond them, is there really any need to store images beyond say 12 months and if you do, is there any need to store anything beyond a few “finished “ images from any particular shoot? Are we becoming a profession without any tangible record of our efforts beyond what has been reproduced?

Personally, I still shoot only film and actually enjoy working in conventional darkrooms. However, I am definitely an exception and a very small market for producers, hence the exodus from the manufacture of traditional photographic products, by almost all of the major manufacturers. Am I and those like me, going to be the last photographers to leave behind a legacy, in the form of actual images and prints, documenting their time in this life and profession? Is this great debate over hard drives vs. DVD storage, merely a stage in the transition to the disposable image? Is it possible that as future generations of photographers emerge, the concept of documenting a life in photography with their images will be a foreign one? We know that film, properly stored and prints properly processed will last at least 100 years. To date, digital images appear to last only as long as your storage medium. If the hard drive crashes, so does your image collection and perhaps you will be able to recover it. Does this therefore, become a selling point for not bothering to store images beyond their immediate use? As buyers continue to stress that the image is inconsequential beyond the end use and continue to push towards ownership of all commissioned works, it becomes more and more sensible to them that the image need not be available forever. Also, as this attitude becomes more prevalent, buyers will see the advantages of not using high cost professional image makers for any of their every day needs. The retailer I mentioned earlier in this piece, no longer uses professionals for their web or catalogue images. They hired a local retailer to set up a simple studio and purchased a mid range digital SLR and the lighting needed to shoot their own material. Now an art department employee does all that shooting and if it doesn’t turn out, they simply erase and shoot again. The learning curve is not that steep and even a blind squirrel will find a nut.

I for one do not want to see a world where few if any photographers preserve their work, even the most mundane work, but I wonder if that is where we are headed nevertheless? Is there a place for archiving ones life’s work in this increasingly disposable world? I wonder.