Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2003/06/20
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Hi Gerry!
You are of course 100% correct on this. The tragedy
is that nothing could be or can be done about it to somehow
reverse the digital tide. You feel like Tom Hanks in "The
Castaway" fighting the tide.
Rich
Gerry Walden wrote:
> I heard recently that the Twentieth Century will be 'the century of
> film' because, give or take a few years, it will historically be shown
> as the only century in which film was used to record things which are
> then retained for the future. As such it will prove to be the century
> for which we have the most complete record.
>
> The reality is that digital images are being wiped from peoples
> computers all the time for all kinds of reasons. Images which were
> thought to be mundane a century ago are now proving to be a cornerstone
> of social history. The work of people like Margaret Bourke White, Walker
> Evans et el give an unparalleled insight into that period of history, as
> does the work of Fenton before them and Bailey, McCullen, Burrows etc.
> since. Would that work still be available if it were on digital media?
>
> I remember one of the most respected picture editors in the UK (Eamon
> McCabe) saying that so many images were arriving at his desk during the
> Los Angeles Olympics (the first to be covered totally by the major
> agencies on digital cameras and email transmission) that he found it
> impossible to keep up and was deleting whole files without even looking!
> The work of initial editing had moved from the photographers selecting
> images to the picture editor who was getting whole sequences of frames.
>
> I find this loss of archival record to be of serious concern which
> appears to have been disregarded in the headlong rush to use the very
> latest technology
>
> Gerry
>
> --
> Gerry Walden LRPS
> www.gwpics.com
> +44 23 8046 3076
>
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