Here today...gone tomorrow...

[Blansky]

When I started as a professional photographer back in the middle 1970s, obviously we all used film to take our pictures. But a number of years later the switch was made to digital recording of the images instead of a physical record such as film.

Amongst pros, one of the things that came up, was that soon not only our files from a few years ago could disappear on a crashed hard drive, but that there would not be a hidden long forgotten record of the billions of pictures that ordinary people had taken, and later found in basements and attics of recently deceased parents, for instance. The incredible archive of a family history.

This archive of long past memories would disappear as the hard drives of computers and old phones would eventually crash leaving nothing. So we paranoid professionals soon were backing up our thousands of images on various drives. (I used 5) Unfortunately amateur photographers were not doing the same thing.

A number of years ago a guy that was scouring auctions at storage facilities accidentally discovered an incredible find of thousands of pictures taken by a long forgotten Nanny. That story turned into a move/documentary called FINDING VIVIAN MAIER. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/histo...ury-180984665/

https://www.amazon.com/Finding-Vivia.../dp/B00LKURN1I

Had she shot her work on digital it would have undoubtedly disappeared into the ether.


This morning I read about how we are also losing our digital history from the internet, as past websites and pages are also disappearing.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2...e-the-internet