How do you like your photos?
We have an ongoing argument in our family. Since from about four years ago our
primary camera has become a digital camera, our family photographs are stored
on disk or on our hard drives. I am, of course, quite
at home in a digital environment, and for me keeping photos on disk is logical,
even obvious. These photographs are, to my mind, very accessible in this format,
and even exist in multiple copies, over various backups, such that the danger
of their getting lost, or fading, is rather minimal. Tzippi, on the other hand,
thinks that a photograph is something you can hold in your hand, something that
can be placed inside an album, and viewed collectively, sitting on the couch.
As important as this ongoing argument may be, it seems to me that it sidesteps
the major question - why do we want to look at all those photographs in the first
place. Susan Sontag's On
Photography sat on an accessible shelf until about three years ago when our
remodeling caused me to put it in a box. Though we've been back in our home for
a year and a half, bookshelves are still missing (at least for the books we might
ordinarily have on those shelves), and until perhaps halfway
through the writing of this column, Sontag's book was still inaccessible.
Sontag wrote about the way the prevalence of photographs affected, and changed,
our ways of seeing. Is our veritable inundation in photographs, caused by the
ascendance of digital cameras and the ability to post them to sites like Flickr,
a continuation of that, or has it created a new reality beyond what Sontag envisioned?
Go to: The shoebox advantage.