A recent job working with a museum to design a digital asset management work flow while, at the same time trying to get my own hopeless, inconsistently stored mess of scans and digital captures under control rubbed my nose in the impending digital disaster awaiting me and every other amateur photographer. Institutions - museums, libraries, archives - are beginning to get digital preservation under control, carefully planing the migration of files from format to format, medium to medium. But most non-professionals haven't given it a moment's thought.
Even for those in the know, "beginning" is the key word and planning for the preservation of digital media is by far the exception. It's not only that it takes a lot of planning and investment: it's that the core concept, that digital obsolescence is far more insidious than the gradual degradation of physical materials, is very hard for us to grasp. Our technology is moving way ahead of our awareness of the profound changes that are happening. Nothing that we shoot with our beautiful digital machines will last more than the span of our own lifetimes without eternal vigilance. Somehow, the fact that this has already happened to audio and video recording hasn't changed our blithe indifference to what moving from a visible image to a digital representation means for our grandchildren's ability to see what their parents looked like as kids. The irony of our ability to shoot insanely huge numbers of images is that an even tinier proportion of those will survive into the future than what we shot on film.
While I'm confident that my friends at the National Gallery or the Art Institute of Chicago will manage their archive for many generations to come, I doubt my own digital work will last any longer than the care and attention that I can personally devote to it. Maybe I'm unusual in this regard, but I haven't actually printed more than a tiny handful of photographs in the past 15 years. In the past 5 years I haven't printed a thing. Well over half of what I've shot is on film, and as scary as it is knowing that my negatives are unique and would be irretrievably lost if we had a fire (or would be gone already if I had kept them in my ground-floor darkroom in New Orleans), it seems to me much easier to guard against fire or grab the binders in advance of an impending flood than to remember that I really have to run integrity checks on my DVD's every once in a while and remember to convert all of those early Raw files to dng. I just can't seem to ever feel comfortable with the incorporeal nature of a computer file as the sole representation of an image I really like and am vain enough to think will be liked by others even after I'm gone.
Most families treasure their photographs above all else. Time and again, it's the piles of pictures and the photo albums (and video tapes) that people grab when fleeing a disaster, not the silver or the china. But what's a photo album now? It's not the default archive that physical albums (and for most of us, shoeboxes filled with drugstore photo envelopes) used to be. The original albums were primarily designed to share images, but ultimately took on that archival function. But now we've specialized - we've teased out the sharing function from the photo album and assigned it to Facebook or Flickr, while not noticing that the archival function isn't there. We now trust the most sentimental talismans of our lives to corporations with the life spans of fruit flies. Or optical media that will disintegrate within a decade or become unreadable. I'm sure people still make plenty of prints, but I'll bet anything that the absolute number of photographic prints made will soon begin to diminish, despite the logarithmic increase in the number of pictures actually taken.
