E keck, I like the idea of landfill archiving a lot, but I'm more intrigued by the lethal prints with the multi-millennium half life. Do you think uranium toning is good enough? http://www.jackspcs.com/ut.htm
For some reason, Bud at the Formulary keeps hanging up when I ask about photo-grade plutonium.
It's all about compromise. If you use the Epson liquid products you can get very low per print costs, amazing ease of use and big bold colors but you are compromising the life of the image. That also goes for any type of C print and who knows what's really going on with all of the different inkjet papers on the market right now.
That's just what we do in our lives though, we compromise. Sellers of things compromise and so do buyers and we all have ways of justifying our choices and decisions. There is no gold standard in the sale of art, there is no guarantee that it's going to be worth something now or in the future but there is an implied warranty in the sale of art and that warranty is related to the physical life of the artwork. The maker of the thing has a responsibility to the buyer to atleast get that part right.
There is a "it's good enough" attitude in the marketplace and in the long run it's going to hurt everyone. It will be interesting to see what happens to the marketplace in years to come when all of the photo prints that are being sold today, for in some cases tens of thousands of dollars, start to fade away. I guess everyone will just blame it all on Wilhelm.
[b]paulr[b] www.jackspcs.com/ut.htm
Which reminds me that last Friday my supervisor sent me a one-line email, "Get that radioactive lens out of your office immediately!" And here I thought he was just a prince (oops, misspelling there.) It is still in my office, by the door. Funny how he never walks in here anymore.
Archival? Picture Mad Max's mavens singing a canticle to an Elvis on Black Velvet print. The worst crap manages to survive. Seriously. You want your work to last forever - put it on the Internet. It's IMPOSSIBLE to get it out once it infuses into the wick of bits.
John Kasanian mentions a cardboard box full of photographs from the teens, twenties, and thirties. Such treasure troves of images (enjoyed no less if they are faded) are a sure casualty of the digital revolution. Now, in recently deceased grandfather's house we will find a Pentium II and some old floppies. How often will anyone search for jpgs or correspondence or diary entries, before junking it all? njb
Easy Nacio,
Now the box will hold Gold CD & DVD media with all the photos stored & unfaded. And considering CD media & DVD is so well entrenched, we'll still have players 100 years from now as we do with 78 & 33 RPM turntables.
Floppies were really used before the start of digital photography becoming mainstream and as such is not really a valid example.
the box could also hold prints.
Sure there could be long-lasting CDs and DVDs. My point is that I think that too frequently it will not occur to people what these might contain and that they will be tossed out. njb
FWIW, heres how I see it: An ordinary photograph takes the least technology to retrieve ( your feet, hands and eyes) The photographic print is the media. Even if you only have a negative, making a contact print is as high tech as it gets---even if you have to sensitize your own paper.
Any electronic/digital media requires sophisticated technology to retrieve. The image is in effect held captive by whomsoever owns the rights to the technology and therefore controls both the future retrieval of the image and expected longevity of the media and how long the technology will be appropiate before it is supplanted by a new technology.
This is where the big $$ are.
Even if a perfect and permanent digital image could be printed (and there is no way to prove an image will last say, 1000 years unless you want to live that long to verify it) there would be no incentive to do so other than as sales hype---in fact there is no incentive because if a company produced the "perfect" technology how would they continue to bring out new models to generate more profit? Something bigger and better has to come along and the old technology killed off so more people will buy into the new toy.
That is one of the reasons that I find LF so appealing.
"I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority"---EB White
John- I have to admit, there's something quite satisfying about using a camera made about the time I was born (Kodak 8x0 Master from the fifties), and still have it be state-of-the-art technology. Even my old 2D (1930's?) still gives me wonderful negatives...
A little over a year ago, I took some portraits of my grandmother (then 99 years old) with a camera old enough she might well have been photographed with the same model the first time she married, in the mid-1920s. Using modern film in the glass plate holders, and a lens, shutter and camera body at least ten years older than my father (who's been retired for some years), I produced images that have the potential to last long enough for my brother's grandkids to wonder about when he's 99 years old (no grandkids here -- prerequisite unfufilled). If I have a choice, those three girls (young women, really, at least the older two, and the third well on the way) will be the recipients of my photographic legacy -- all three of them are smart enough to know what it is, remember their uncle and a grand-uncle with their old mechanical cameras, and all will remember their great-grandma with her curly, snow-white hair.
Nothing I can do digitally will carry the weight of years the way those film negatives will.
If a contact print at arm's length is too small to see, you need a bigger camera. :D
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks