October 8, 2003
Digital era 'a threat to memories'
This interesting article from The Age, brings up concerns about the digital revolution's effect on photographic posterity.
And though the article refers only to digital cameras, camera phones are definitely part of the equasion (cf Picture Phones Surpass Sales of Digital Cameras).
"With digital cameras now outselling their film predecessors, Australians are taking more photos than ever before - but few of them are being printed.
Historical records as well as family albums may suffer, with less than 20 per cent of pictures making it into print, says the Photographic Imaging Council of Australia.
But instead of printing pictures when memory cards fill up, most digital camera owners store them on hard drives, which are at risk of being lost in computer crashes or virus attacks, or may not be printable in years to come due to technological changes.
And those photographs that are printed at home are often not on photographic-quality paper and are therefore destined to fade.
Concerns about the digital revolution's effect on photographic posterity echoes earlier concerns about the advent of email and SMS messaging. Although they led to increased correspondence, most of the writing was doomed to disappear under the delete key, leaving future biographers and historians lacking in written accounts of our daily lives".
"The tragedy is we may well look back on this period as a time when very few photographs were printed," - Managing director Rob Tolmie of Digital Photoworks.
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