Image as Currency

[Jay DeFehr]

If we think of an image as a unit of currency, and the service it buys as preservation, what determines any image's buying power?

Jonathan (jcoldslabs) commented in another thread on the likelihood his digital images will be preserved at FB relative to his film negatives at home. Jonathan's remarks inspired my question above. I look forward to your thoughts.

[sepstein17]

Demand-side economics (with apologies R.R.)

[Greg Lockrey]

I once had an artist who wanted to trade the signed images I made for him in lieu of payment for scanning and printing his work. I told him I could make all of the images I wanted to hang if I desired and that the only signature I needed was one on his check. :D

[Ben Syverson]

If an image is a unit of currency, then we've begun a never-ending period of exponential hyperinflation. But that has nothing to do with preservation.

The odds of an image surviving for 10 years have probably never been better than they are right now. A black and white negative might theoretically last 400 years if stored properly, but it doesn't last long in a landfill after the photographer and his/her spouse die. Sorry to put it so bluntly, but I've seen countless boxes of photos and negatives at thrift stores.

Some of the photos from my childhood exist only as prints. In the film days, people may have cherished prints, but they often abused, misplaced or intentionally threw away negatives!

The darkest days were probably around 2004-6. A probable majority of people had stopped taking film photos, but they weren't backing them up, either. I know several people who lost thousands of photos when a hard drive or laptop crashed.

These days, a photo should be flattered if it makes it onto the photographer's hard drive. A growing number of photos are uploaded directly from the camera (phone) to a service like Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flickr, etc. Despite the hand-wringing, the cloud is much safer than the average photographer's half-baked backup strategy.

The biggest threat to a photo in the cloud is bankruptcy. By some estimates, Facebook contains over 100 BILLION photos. If you figure 1MB per image (most are little cellphone snaps), you'd need about 100,000 terabyte drives to store them. So if Facebook goes belly-up, it faces the logistical problem of how to alert their users to take back their data, and how to actually get it to them.

For those of us who really care about our photos (we're a shrinking minority), the answer is to spread your photos like genetic material on as many storage devices as you can. Eggs, basket, etc. You need a backup strategy that's diversified, not just redundant. Perhaps most importantly, you need to make sure your work ends up in the hands of an archivist when you die. That can be a family member, or you can donate your photos to a historical society in your will.

If you don't do that, then the life expectancy of your photos is 78.1 (http://www.google.com/publicdata/explore?ds=d5bncppjof8f9_&met_y=sp_dyn_le00_in&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=life+expectancy+us) years, minus your current age. Less if you smoke. :)

[Jay DeFehr]

I once had an artist who wanted to trade the signed images I made for him in lieu of payment for scanning and printing his work. I told him I could make all of the images I wanted to hang if I desired and that the only signature I needed was one on his check. :D

Hi Greg,

Great story! Clearly your artist's valuation of his work didn't align with your valuation of yours, so he couldn't buy your services with his work. What I'm wondering about is how much preservation he could buy with the same currency.

Maybe my question is not very clear, so I'll give an example of what I have in mind. The much discussed Gursky image, for instance is very likely to be preserved, if for no other reason than its documented monetary value- it has a lot of buying power. Any image that finds its way into a stable archive, like the Library of Congress, for example, has a high probability of preservation, while a profile image for a FB account might have near 0 probability of preservation, or no buying power. On the other hand, the Parked Domain Girl image might live on forever, and outlast the Gursky, should said Gursky fall victim to fire, flood, or other worldly fates, despite the PDG's substantial similarity to a FB profile photo. Does the Parked Domain Girl image have more preservation-buying power than the world's most expensive photo?

[Jay DeFehr]

Ben,

You've made some very good points, but what I'm most interested in here, is the question of what contributes to an image's preservation-buying power. Your comments seem to be confined to images that are of interest/value only to the photographer, and I think you're right, that alone doesn't buy much preservation, in most cases.


Ben (italics mine):
If an image is a unit of currency, then we've begun a never-ending period of exponential hyperinflation. But that has nothing to do with preservation.

I think the first bit of the above is astute, but I'm not sure I agree with the last bit. At least in the terms of the currency analogy, inflation is relevant, and maybe important.It certainly creates a distinction between physical images like prints and negatives, and virtual images.

I've got to run, but I'll continue later. Thanks for your thoughts!

[Mike Anderson]

8 Ways To Preserve Your Pictures (http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2011/06/eight-ways-to-preserve-your-pictures.html)

from TOP.

..Mike

[Richard M. Coda]

I'm hoping they are currency... I have seven prints by four members of that "W" family. Was hoping they would cover my daughter's college one day. Well, that is now next year and the economy sucks and college tuition is ridiculous... they will probably be worth much more if I just leave them to her to do as she wishes.

[urs0polar]

Photographs are more like something you barter with... "currency" implies something that doesn't have any value in the item itself per se (pieces of special paper with numbers on them), that people trade in lieu of a barter system.

So, in a barter system, I grow rice and trade it directly for a cow or something else that is an end product. In a currency system, I trade rice for something that everyone agrees has the same value -- a numbered piece of paper issued by a bank, for instance -- and take that piece of paper and then trade it for the cow. The currency system takes the barter system and decouples it so that I no longer need to know the person who raised the cow.

So, are you saying that images are currency as in we can use images to trade for things? I think that's a little broken as the whole point of currency is that it is not unique per se -- even gold, which has much more intrinsic value than paper, is sold based on weight, not the uniqueness of the individual coin or bar.

Also, to trade an image for something is fundamentally nonsensical because not everyone agrees on the value of the image. (nowadays, I might even trade a print of the image for currency, but download a low-res version for free...).

The OP said that the image bought preservation... preservation of what? Personal memories? Maybe in the context of a single person, yeah, my picture of my cat is certainly a method for me to preserve my memory of him, but I can also remember him without the photo. And, to anyone else, it's just a photo of a cat. If it reminds them of their cat, then it's not the same thing being "preserved" anyhow.

As for buying power, an image is (presumably) art, and it's worth is in the eye of the beholder -- the "beholder" being an individual. Even in the commercial sense, a well-executed image of a Toyota Prius next to a green energy windfarm or whatever is of great value to Toyota as they can put it in magazines and billboards and what have you to make people want to buy it. Me, I could care less: it's not really anything I want (and I can't trade it for anything as I'm not the original photographer), whether in a perfectly executed print or a compuserve .gif (remember those?). So to me it preserves very little.

Some images *are* worth a lot to a lot of people, and there is a market for them, like an original Weston print or whatever. But that market is very limited because there is a limited number of said prints, and not everybody wants them.

Currency and images sounds like apples and oranges to me...

...Other than that, what Ben Syverson said.

[rdenney]

If we think of an image as a unit of currency, and the service it buys as preservation, what determines any image's buying power?

I'm not sure the hypothetical situation occurs that often, and I think its occurrence is getting less and less frequent. I suspect few actually care if their images last until next year, the same way they used to not care if they threw away their negatives. Most of those 100,000 tarabytes of images on Facebook, if they disappeared tomorrow, would be only mildly lamented by the vast majority of their creators.

If there is value in preservation of a photograph for most people, it would be in the time and place context of the subject it portrays, as a memento (trivially) or important bit of history.

You didn't restrict this thread to art photography, which I think is a tiny slice of photography not necessarily relevant here. And even a lot of art photography, if it buys preservation, does so for the same reason: an important or interesting subject and its time and place. I suspect much art photography buys cachet, which would be a different thread. Or it's a currency that buys the service of artistic satisfaction on the part of the viewer, which would be a still different thread.

Most of us care about permanence only for what our heirs will think is the delusional reason that what we do as photographers is important enough to survive our departure. Sentimentality might--might--last a generation.

Summarizing: If an image can buy the service of permanence, then it does so only because it has interesting historical value as a result of its subject and the subject's time and place context. But I don't think an image buys the service of permanence more than rarely.

Rick "not thinking any qualified archivist would accept a bequest of his work without it coming with enough money to pay to archive it--plus overhead and expenses" Denney

[Ben Syverson]

I think the first bit of the above is astute, but I'm not sure I agree with the last bit. At least in the terms of the currency analogy, inflation is relevant, and maybe important.It certainly creates a distinction between physical images like prints and negatives, and virtual images.
Jay, I'm curious to hear more from you about this, rather than more of me!

From my perspective, there are three components to your thesis/question: #1: Images as a unit of currency. #2: Preservation as a scarce resource that images "buy." #3: How images are evaluated for worth.

So it's really three indirectly related questions/ideas.

#1 is what I've tried to address, with respect to #2. Basically, the currency metaphor falls apart, because if images were currency, we would be living in a world where you pay $1000 for an apple in the morning, and $100,000 for an apple in the evening. An image has zero—or maybe less than zero—"inherent" worth.

#2 presupposes that preservation is a scarce resource, which is not necessarily true. You get some amount of high quality preservation from Facebook, in exchange from seeing (ignoring) advertising. Similarly, handing your negatives to your brother is free, but is highly effective in preserving those photos.

#3 I've ignored, because it's self-evident. Something that is canonized, such as a Gursky, Adams or Weston print, will receive state of the art preservation, restoration and conservation (three separate fields). A Facebook photo you took just now will be preserved, but "worth" is subjective and unrelated to longevity.

[jcoldslabs]

I am lucky to have family photographs (prints) dating back to the late 1880s and negatives as far back as 1920. Those that have survived and come into my care have a high value to me because of their relative rarity (a couple hundred prints and maybe twenty or so negatives). These are images of historical significance to my family and therefore are likely to preserved both by me and the next generation or two in part because the cost of preservation in a few archival boxes and sleeves is small relative to the value of the artifacts.

By virtue of my own output, my heirs will likely inherit many thousands of prints (mostly snaps but many art shots among them) and thousands of negatives of all formats. The sheer volume alone ensures that the value to future generations will be less. The buying power of this currency is low for preservation because the value per image is significantly reduced yet the costs of properly storing these images is ever increasing (digital transfer notwithstanding).

Which would you rather inherit: a stock certificate worth $50,000 or 13 tons of pennies?

There is a reason the only known photograph of Billy the Kid sold for so much money this year. The uniqueness of that image and its historical significance create a high value and increased likelihood of preservation.

Jonathan

[Jay DeFehr]

Gentlemen,

Thank you all for your thoughts, and allow me to try to clarify my intentions. Image as currency is not meant as a metaphor or a hypothetical situation, but as a conceptual framework within which to discuss the features of images that affect preservation. Without some kind of framework, discussing complex issues is vulnerable to ranging too widely, and bogging down in trying to define a context. Mike Johnston's article is a good example. Mike's framework is: What does a photographer need to do to encourage the preservation of his images? This framework lacks the precision required for clear thinking, and provides no structure to support the complexity of his subject. Mike wrote an article, the content of which was entirely within his control, and still he floundered. This thread is meant to be a discussion among many participants, so the conceptual framework is more than important, it's essential.

I'm not arguing that an image is a unit of currency, I'm using the concept as a way to define the roles within a specific relationship (image features to preservation) that allows for complexity while maintaining coherence. This is why my post began with the word, if. My question could be phrased; what are the features of an image that encourage preservation? But that question doesn't provide for the complexity of the subject, and any discussion that followed from it would likely get bogged down in minutia and tangents. Thinking of an image as a unit of currency allows for complexity, while maintaining the constraints of the subject, but it does need some clarification.

Ben's comments about the effects of inflation on the buying power of an image are just what I intended, with one caveat. We shouldn't think of image as a category representing a brand of currency, which would lead to Ben's comment about never ending exponential hyperinflation, but as each individual image as its own currency. This allows us to make a meaningful distinction between the Gursky, of which there are six units, and the PDG image, of which there are countless units.

Likewise, we shouldn't think of an image's buying power in general terms, as if it could purchase any number of goods or services, but strictly in relation to preservation. By thinking of the image as currency, and preservation as what it buys, we define the relationship, and can apply meaningful attributes, like quantifying preservation as a period of time.

The many ways in which an image is not like a unit of currency are not relevant to this discussion. The conceptual framework intends to strip images of any inherent value so that we can identify the specific features that confer preservation-buying power to an image.

Ben,

Thanks for getting the ball rolling. The question of inflation is interesting and addresses a fundamental difference between physical media and virtual media, though the difference is not absolute. A physical image is more expensive to copy than a virtual one, but both can be copied.

Your comment about seeing negatives in thrift stores begs a lot of questions. Why did the negative's custodians put them in a donation box instead of a dumpster? And why would anyone buy them? I realize the potential answers to these questions are as boundless as human motivations, but the fact that you've seen this, as have many of us, not once, but many times, suggest an economy of some kind, about which we can reasonably speculate.

For instance, you note people often value prints above negatives. This aligns with Mike Johnston's point about readability, and might be a feature of the above economy.

Your point about uploading directly from imaging devices indicates a decrease in the price of preservation for those images, and that would seem to bear directly on the preservation-buying power of those images. In other words, whatever we consider to be the features that confer buying power to an image, these images need less of them than images that are more expensive to preserve, for any given period of time.

urs0polar,

By preservation I mean the continued existence of the image.

Rick,

I think value as a memento certainly buys some preservation for an image, but surely there are many other features that buy preservation. If Weston's pepper has historical value, I don't think the subject, or the time and place the photo was made have much to do with it. By your reasoning, not only would all of Weston's peppers be valued similarly, but any pepper photo made by anyone in that place at that time would have a similar lifespan. Yet we know many of Weston's peppers didn't survive the day they were made.

Jonathan,

Your identification of the features of your inherited images that give them buying power in relation to the cost of preservation providing some estimate for how long you can expect them to be preserved is right on point. And by identifying the potential barriers to the preservation of your own work-- those features that negatively impact their buying power-- you can make investments in your images that increase their buying power.

Rick and Jonathan suggested one feature (value as a memento) likely to enhance an image's buying power; what are some others?

Thank you all for your thoughts!

[jcoldslabs]

Since we're talking about preservation over time, presumably longer periods of time, we cannot ignore the fact that our relationship to an image will not be the same as that of future generations.

As an example, I have a 16x20 William Garnett print framed and hanging over my fireplace. I cherish the piece for all kinds of reasons, including its aesthetics, the technical qualities of the print, the history behind the image and the method by which this aerial photograph was made. For me this is not a memento at all but an art object and small piece of California photographic history. For these reasons it has a high likelihood of preservation by me. But to my nephew (my sole heir) who is now 11 years old, this will likely be "that photo that Uncle Jon always had hanging over the fireplace." Upon my death he may hang this picture up in his own house as a reminder of its place in mine. For him it WILL be a memento. Perhaps the same will hold true for his heirs to the point that, down the generations, who took the photo and its provenance may be lost, but its significance as "something that has been in the family for generations" will increase, and the likelihood of preservation will remain high for a different reason than for me.

Jonathan

[Jay DeFehr]

Ben,

Regarding your three points above:

#1. It was my intention to strip an image of any inherent worth for the purposes of this discussion. An image is a unit of currency only in relation to its power to buy preservation. Regarding inflation, its effect on the preservation-buying power of an image is not as clear cut as its effect on the general buying power of actual currency. Knowing how many copies of the PDG image exist makes it very easy to delete the image, however we might value any of its features. That would seem to describe the effect of inflation on the preservation-buying power of the image-- there are a billion copies of this image, so I don't need to save it-- but that description might be misleading. In this case, the fact that the image is so prodigiously preserved is itself a feature of the image that confers preservation-buying power. Clearly, this image is not valued as a memento of a time and place, or of a famous person, or for any historical significance, yet it's so widely distributed it would be practically impossible to eliminate every copy, however well organized the campaign to do so. The inflation effect on the currency of an image, if it can be said to exist at all, is much more complicated than for real currency.

#2. I didn't claim preservation is a scarce resource, just that there is a cost associated. The cost of preserving an image on FB involves uploading the image to FB, at a minimum. Not every image created has even this rather modest preservation-buying power. Likewise, handing a box of negatives to your brother represents a cost to you, compared to not doing so, and a cost to your brother, as well. Would you hand your brother a box of images of Ed McMahon clipped from Publisher's Clearing House mailings, and if you did, would he keep them, and for how long? Those images in that box must have features that confer to them the power to buy your effort to box them and present them to your brother, and his effort to keep them. What do you think those features are?

#3. "Worth" or preservation-buying power, is always related to longevity. Canonization is a recognition of worth, and canonized images are preserved, restored and conserved on the basis of that worth, for as long as the worth exceeds the expense, but no longer. The same can be said for the FB photo. If I break up with my girlfriend because she's spending too much time with a certain short order cook, the image of her and me at TGI Friday's I posted on my wall suddenly acquires negative preservation-buying power, meaning there is value to me in destroying the image, and suggests the feature of being a memento can have preservation-buying power over a wide range, including negative values.

Jonathan,

I don't think it's useful to limit our discussion to long term preservation, since the idea is to identify features that confer preservation-buying power. Some images are deemed by their creators to have a negative preservation-buying power, such as when a photographer destroys work that doesn't meet his criteria so that it's not included in, and so won't degrade his body of work.

Regarding your William Garnett print, which might one day in the very distant future, pass to your nephew. Your description of how the specific features of the image that conferred to it the the power to buy your preservation of it might not be the same features that buy preservation by your nephew. I'd also like to address another important aspect of your example-- an aggregation of features. To the extent the aggregation of features survive the inheriting, the preservation-buying power of the image is likely to remain stable. If you're somehow able to instill in your nephew your values regarding the entire aggregate of features, with the added feature for him that the image belonged to his Uncle Jonathan, with all his own memories and associations, then the image's preservation-buying power is likely to increase.

I'm beginning to sense a connection to memetics, which would make this discussion akin to an effort to map the image memome.

[Ben Syverson]

Yeah, I think memetics is a better fit than economics. "The Selfish Image." :) The most "interesting" or popular images clearly have a far greater likelihood of surviving in both the short and long term, even if they don't go fully viral.

[Jay DeFehr]

Hi Ben,

I think economics and genetics/memetics fall under the umbrella of evolutionary systems, so I'm not shocked one led to the other. Thinking about images as memes is not new, even to me, but this discussion has already changed the way I think about the concept, especially as it applies to preservation as opposed to replication, and the relationship between replication and preservation. And I think your reference to the selfish gene is an apt one, especially in relation to physical images, which can be seen as a kind of memotype. I'm still wondering about the features that buy preservation, the ones that define interestingness, and how they differ for physical images relative to virtual ones.

[jcoldslabs]

Regarding "features that buy preservation," what is a valuable feature? Any feature that leads to preservation of an image (popularity, scarcity, historical significance, beauty, etc.) is, from the point of view of the image, of value (selfish indeed!)

Duplication is a form of preservation, so the more digital copies of an image that are dispersed across a wide geography the more likely the image is to be preserved. But a smaller, e-mailable/textable/blogable image is more likely to spread virally than a larger, higher resolution one.

It may be that in 1,000 years someone will pull a dirty but intact "Moonrise, Hernandez" shower curtain from a landfill long after the silver gelatin prints of it have vanished.

[Ben Syverson]

Moonrise shower curtain! Now my wife knows what to get me for Christmas. :)

[jnantz]

hi jay

there is an artist named jsg boggs
whose artwork is used as currency.

he doesn't make photographs, but draws his own "boggs bills "

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gEtKSqzpj0Q

john

[rdenney]

By your reasoning, not only would all of Weston's peppers be valued similarly, but any pepper photo made by anyone in that place at that time would have a similar lifespan. Yet we know many of Weston's peppers didn't survive the day they were made.

What makes a Weston image worth more preservation than a Fryburger? (Weston's fictional competitor who also photographed peppers.) It is not necessarily because Weston captured the pepper more artistically than Fryburger did. It is because Weston became famous and Fryburger did not. I thought I included the importance (as indicated by canonization or by historical antique value) and celebrity of the photographer, but maybe I didn't.

Why Weston's work entered the canon is a separate line of thinking, and one possibility (and it's only a possibility) is that Weston's peppers were indeed more artistic. That was certainly the reason why some of them survived the day and others did not, but that was Weston's decision long before they had preservation buying power for any other reason than Weston's artistic ambitions.

So, let me add the artistic ambitions of the photographer to the discussion, but I think I may have already mentioned that, too.

I think it's important to distinguish between casual preservation and intentional preservation. A funny image that goes viral on the Internet might be subject to casual preservation as a byproduct of finding its way to so many storage systems. Those systems may be preserved primarily for other stuff that's on them, or as a matter of routine, and find themselves preserved beyond their worthiness of preservation without any real intent, simply because it's more trouble to remove them than to just preserve them along with the rest. At some point, they may acquire value merely by being old, and move into the second category, which is...

Intentional preservation (using the term more generally than Ben) is when people spend time and money to preserve that particular image.

In the first case, the image's ability to buy preservation may be negligible, despite its ability to buy dissemination (which is outside your framework). But it may be preserved as a byproduct of dissemination. We might draw the wrong conclusions if we assume anybody cared that these images were preserved just because they happened to be. I assume archeologists have to deal with this consideration all the time.

The factors I have suggested apply to images people intentionally preserve, at least for some period of time. That period of time will vary. As you have pointed out, the value of an image as a memento can be positive or negative and can change rapidly with circumstances.

But the same is true for images of important subjects. If an iconic subject becomes evil, images of that subject may be subject to iconoclasm. People destroyed images of Hitler, as Hitler destroyed images of religious subjects. In some cases, the victim of iconoclasm might lapse into obscurity and never been seen again. In other cases, the subject's importance might transcend iconoclasm and become valuable for buying preservation again, as have pictures of even such as Hitler. That may be a test of importance, or of the success of the iconoclasts in expunging the hated images.

And it's true for image importance, though perhaps in this category they don't go negative. The photographer's celebrity may fade, or the canon may be revised, and the image may lose its ability to buy preservation. It might then be preserved because it is merely old and had antique historical value, or it might end up in a dumpster. Surely not every objet d'art that was thought worthy of preservation is still in existence, and of those that have been destroyed, surely some were destroyed because they were no longer worth saving and not just because of being subject to accident or whatever.

Rick "suspecting that the ubiquity of casual preservation may reduce the value of intentional preservation, but that's another issue" Denney

[Jay DeFehr]

Hi Rick,

Certainly both Belongs to canon, and made by famous photographer are appropriate to a list of features that buy preservation, but canonization is essentially synonymous with preservation, and I'm more interested in the specific features that contribute to canonization.

For the purposes of this discussion, it's not important to distinguish between casual preservation and intentional preservation, since we're considering preservation a consequence of features specific to an image, and not anyone's intentions. As Jonathan said above, "Any feature that leads to preservation of an image (popularity, scarcity, historical significance, beauty, etc.) is, from the point of view of the image, of value (selfish indeed!)". And we could add to Jonathan's short list any feature that leads to an image being replicated/disseminated, which is certainly within my framework.

Our discussion is not primarily concerned with the intentions of people to preserve images, but the features of an image that buy preservation, and conversely, those that buy negative preservation, or destruction. Again, Jonathan makes the point:


Duplication is a form of preservation, so the more digital copies of an image that are dispersed across a wide geography the more likely the image is to be preserved. But a smaller, e-mailable/textable/blogable image is more likely to spread virally than a larger, higher resolution one.

I thought someone made the point earlier in the thread that large physical images, like the Gursky, are more expensive to preserve than smaller images, and that fact introduces a vulnerability to the image's potential preservation. I think this is interesting in relation to Jonathan's point above about image file size as a factor in dissemination. In both cases image size introduces a kind of friction that potentially brakes preservation.

Image size also bears on production, so that a large image is less likely to made in any number than a smaller image. Very small images would seem to suffer a disadvantage as well, as viewability decreases, and so there might be an image size range within which preservation is most likely.

One way to build a list of features might be to look at the criteria for acceptance into stable archives, like the Library of Congress, or the George Eastman House archive, or other institutions that have criteria for acceptance. This list would only apply to physical images, as there is no criteria for acceptance into virtual image archives, like FB, Flickr, etc. (or is there?). I would guess any feature that caused an image to be barred from FB would have a negative preservation value.

And I suppose that's another way to address the issue; a list of every image feature with an associated preservation value.

There might be more than one way to quantify preservation, or perhaps preservation is multifaceted. If we wanted to know what is the world's most preserved image, would we look for the oldest image still in existence, or the image with the most copies in existence, or a preservation factor based on a combination of the two?

John,

Thanks for the link! Fascinating. I think the video of him bartering his work for goods and services is an integral part of the art. I'm going to look for the doc.

Jonathan,

Agreed on all counts.

Thanks for the great discussion. There are drinking buddies and there are thinking buddies, and I'd like to buy you all a round some day.

[rdenney]

For the purposes of this discussion, it's not important to distinguish between casual preservation and intentional preservation, since we're considering preservation a consequence of features specific to an image, and not anyone's intentions. As Jonathan said above, "Any feature that leads to preservation of an image (popularity, scarcity, historical significance, beauty, etc.) is, from the point of view of the image, of value (selfish indeed!)". And we could add to Jonathan's short list any feature that leads to an image being replicated/disseminated, which is certainly within my framework.

Facebook has come up. My point is that many images will be preserved as a result of facebook, but I don't think we should ignore the possibility that many of them are put on facebook solely for dissemination and not for preservation. Facebook is a multipurpose too and not everyone needs every purpose. As I said earlier, it's possible that most who have posted pictures on facebook would not lament their loss if facebook ceased to be suddenly.

I suspect that most images on internet sites are done for dissemination, and are preserved only as long as dissemination is desired. Much is preserved with little dissemination value, however. Museum vaults are filled with stuff that people rarely see, and then only relatively few people (compared to, say, facebook users).

I don't think an image that can buy dissemination is necessarily one that can buy preservation, and I think that's also the difference between ephemera like newspapers and routinely preserved objects like books, even though both are similar media. A newspaper can only buy preservation for certain reasons, including some historical research, and because of the importance of its subjects or authors, but preservation of the disseminated copy at least is not assumed as it is with books. The reasons for each becoming currency may be the same but they may not be, and certainly not necessarily at the same time.

All for now--meeting coming up.

Rick "hurried" Denney

[Ben Syverson]

I've been turning this topic over in my mind for the past few days...

I'm wondering if the photos we post to the cloud may someday be donated to the Library of Congress or a similar archive, after the image hosts go out of business. LOC is already a storehouse for copyrighted material, so they have the proper procedures already in place. And those images would be a treasure trove for future historians.

[Jay DeFehr]

Rick,

I think you're falling into a trap similar to the one that leads some people to believe birds evolved wings so they could fly, or that people have sex because it feels good.

It doesn't matter that people put images on FB for dissemination, what matters is how dissemination is related to preservation. If the image features buy dissemination, and dissemination increases preservation, then we've identified features that buy preservation. For our purposes, Weston's rejected pepper images are no different than the hundreds of vacation images my sister deleted because she thought her arms looked fat. In this framework, the only value that matters is preservation value. The preservation value of a Weston reject is exactly equivalent to the preservation value of my sister's fat-armed vacation images- 0, or some negative value, since both Weston and my sister placed a positive value on their images not being preserved.

Ben,

http://mashable.com/2010/05/30/library-of-congress-web-archive/

[rdenney]

Rick,

I think you're falling into a trap similar to the one that leads some people to believe birds evolved wings so they could fly, or that people have sex because it feels good.

It doesn't matter that people put images on FB for dissemination, what matters is how dissemination is related to preservation. If the image features buy dissemination, and dissemination increases preservation, then we've identified features that buy preservation.

I don't see how. If Facebook pages were purged of pictures every week, would people still post pictures there? Those that they would post there don't seem to buy much preservation, it seems to me. Okay, maybe they are worth a portion of a week's worth of preservation.

Rick "doing this too fast for proper thought, assuming such is possible" Denney

[Jay DeFehr]

Rick,

Even if FB purged the photos every week, there would still be image features that buy preservation. The only difference would be the degree of dissemination; the dynamic remains intact.

Keep in mind, we're discussing features of images, and not the images themselves, analogous to the genotype/phenotype distinction.

For our purposes, the intentions of any person regarding the dissemination/preservation of an image are not any more important than the intentions of the mosquito regarding the dissemination of botfly larvae.

[Vincent Pidone]

AnonymousPictures.tumblr.com

Started as something of a joke, this continues for something like a concern for the issues you discuss here.

The next time you see something interesting in a box at a yard sale that you don't want yourself.....

[Jay DeFehr]

Hi Vincent,

What are you doing there? Are you collecting anonymous images? Do have any criteria for acceptance? Where do you find your images? Happy to have you in the discussion!

[Vincent Pidone]

Jay,

I just thought that folks who agonize about the survival of their own images and the iconic images that we have learned to respect might have some interest in vernacular images as well.

As to large format, I'm interested in wet plate mostly, as no access to a darkroom.

In the course of looking at photo gear, I keep running into photos. It seems to me that some of them should not be lost, even though we don't know which one is aunt Emma and which one is aunt Ellie....

I like good images. I even like "bad" images. What doesn't make it to my blog goes to the trash (or to collage artists, when I can get them to take the stuff) so the issue of an image's survival has a different resonance for me than it does for many of you.

A junk shop guy gave me a garbage bag with about five pounds of snapshots in it the other day. A lot more than four pounds of it is heading for the trash, but the dozen or so "good" ones are worth the effort at editing and eventually, scanning.

[Jay DeFehr]

Very interesting, Vincent. Do you have a conscious criteria for your image selection, or is it more a matter of just knowing a good one when you see it?

[Vincent Pidone]

The formal selection criteria is three parts (four?)

Cheap.

Available (ie shows up at my favorite junk shop or flea market).
Everything on that site (with a few flagged exceptions) is in my collection as hard copy;
I own either the original print or the negative.

Anonymous. I'm not reblogging anyone else or posting pictures from the canon of photo history. ie Images that would be overlooked if I don't save it when I find it.

Some aesthetic or historic or emotional trigger. The image has to work at some level.

I try to avoid studio shots unless they are naive or otherwise odd. There are a few exceptions out there.

Note that I am no alone in doing this, there are other sites doing similar things, some with specific agendas. My agenda is stated above.

I am not an archivist. After scanning, the prints or negatives go back into the shoe box they came out of. (Sometimes a new shoe box.) The archive, such as it is, is the online posting on tumblr.

I hope that's not more than you want to know.

If you question the aesthetic quality of what is out there, please remember that I either didn't find anything better, or more likely, couldn't afford it.

[Jay DeFehr]

Hi Vincent,

Your post above answers my question exactly. You addressed the expense of preservation as a feature, and your preference for digital archiving, though you maintain a physical archive, as well. This dual strategy allows for dissemination as a form of preservation in addition to the shoe box brand. Anonymity is also a preservation-buying feature, for you, and finally aesthetic quality, which I think is appropriately non-specific. Interestingly, some of your criteria are mirror images of more typically recognized features. We've mentioned earlier in this thread the monetary value of an image, and the notoriety of the photographer as preservation-buying features. It's a useful reminder that mirror image features are not mutually exclusive. Do you have any policy regarding the dissemination of the images you post?

Thanks for providing us some concrete examples!

[Vincent Pidone]

Jay,

If you look at the top of the site you should find a "Creative Commons" tag that is intended to let folks (who know to look for it) know that they can reuse the contents of the site for any non-commercial use (without asking) if they credit the source.

Commercial use requires prior permission.

The CC tags should link to the permissions that I have specified.

The idea is that your kid can reblog and your sister can use the images in her art work without asking, but Pepsi may not design retro soda cans with those images without asking first.

See creativecommons.org for more than you probably want to know about permissions.

[Jay DeFehr]

Hi Vincent,

I have the same license for my personal images at Flickr. Thanks for sharing here, and elsewhere.

[Vincent Pidone]

Polaroid of a Dagurerreotype here:

http://anonymouspictures.tumblr.com/post/10437541653/polaroid-of-a-daguerreotype

I found this in an antique shop's box of photos.

No, not the Dag, the Polaroid.

OK, where is that Dag now?

I suspect that since it was probably rephotographed by a pro (4x5 Polaroid, no glare, no background clutter, etc.) the "owner" at the time was looking to sell it, so it may not have been lost.

However, from my perspective, the only thing I have to preserve is the Polaroid.

I thought the image was worth my time to scan it and post it and worth the $1 that I paid for it.

It was worth it to be able to send the scan to my antique-photo-dealer friend saying, "Look what I found for $1." and wait for the reply before clarifying that I only had the Polaroid.

Jay, If you wanted me to state the features of that Dag that would "buy" it preservation, I probably would fumble, but I suspect that anyone interested in photographs would agree that this image has that buying power.

I don't think that Dag was taken as an art photograph, just a family portrait. We don't know who they were, or who the photographer was.

I would be happy to take a few pictures that are this good.

[Jay DeFehr]

Great story, Vincent-- thanks for sharing. It's fascinating how an image can transfer itself to another media and live on in a new form. This image was born as a daguerreotype, became a Polaroid, and now a digital file; that's adaptation!