I don't own a camera simply because having lost countless indubitably brilliant photographs due to previously owned cameras breaking, being lost or in the worst case stolen I decided long ago to let others take pictures and make copies of theirs. Though having experienced the irritating and bitter loss of photographs from an amazing time in your life (Paris 1994 - sigh), when I read this article from the Observer it hit a cord.
John Naughton
The Observer, Sunday 14 August 2011
'Speechless. Tears. Read this," said a tweet in my Twitterstream. "This" turned out to be a website called Dear Photograph. It invites people to post pictures that incorporate photographs from their past taken in the locations featured in the original picture, much as people hold postcards of the Eiffel Tower so that the card obscures the actual view of the tower. It's a remarkably simple but powerful idea, and it does indeed evoke some of the responses mentioned in the tweet that brought me to the site. Here's a photograph of a smiling child. Behind her is a stocky man in a baseball cap, with his arms resting on hers. "Dear Photograph," the caption reads, "Dad is gone… but the strength of his arms will always be around us." It's signed "Holly".
Here's another. It shows a couple seated on a bench in a wood. One has an arm around the other. The caption reads: "I fell in love with a woman. I'm not ready to let go… but she is."
A third picture shows a crumpled snapshot of a woman, dressed in a 1940s outfit, walking along a street. "Dear Photograph," it reads, "If I could turn the corner in 1942 and walk right into my mother, I'd ask her, 'May I walk beside you one more time?' Love, Your Daughter."
Another shows two kids dressed in clown outfits. "We were inseparable for 26 years," says the caption, "till cancer came her way. Can you please give me my sister back?"
Not all of the photographs are about loss of a loved one. There's a picture of a young girl with a hula-hoop. "I wish I could still hula-hoop like I used to," says the caption.
Dear Photograph is a remarkable demonstration of the power of ordinary, humdrum photographs to evoke memories. Anyone who has ever found a shoebox of old prints in an attic will know this. They yield up images of ourselves when we were young, slender and innocent, of our parents with unlined, carefree expressions and unfurrowed, untroubled brows, of holidays once enjoyed, places once visited. Photographs freeze moments in time, reminding us of who we were – and, by implication, of who we have become.
But Dear Photograph is also a stark reminder of how threatened this power of photography has become. There is, for one thing, the brusque, matter-of-fact, upfront Terms and Conditions of the site. "When you submit your materials," it reads, "you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise under our discretion in any and all media". Or, to adapt the famous broken English internet meme, "all your memories are belong to us".
There's nothing new in this, of course. It also applies to the billions of photographs that have been posted to Facebook, under Terms and Conditions stipulating that "you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP Licence). This IP Licence ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it."
The other sobering thought triggered by Dear Photograph is that the site is only possible because of the relative permanence of analogue photography. The images on the site are, of course, digital, but they could only have been created using old photographic prints. All of which means that it will be very difficult to do something like this in 30 years' time.
The reason is that while digital technology has generally been very good for photography as a mass medium, it has also made the resulting imagery much more fragile and impermanent. Of the billions of photographs taken every year, the vast majority exist only as digital files on camera memory cards or on the hard drives of PCs and servers in the internet "cloud". In theory – given the right back-up regimes and long-term organisational arrangements – this means that they could, theoretically, endure for a long time. In practice, given the vulnerability of storage technology (all hard disks fail, eventually), the pace at which computing kit becomes obsolete and storage formats change, and the fact that most people's Facebook accounts die with them, the likelihood is that most of those billions of photographs will not long survive those who took them.
That's why Magnum photographer Martin Parr concluded his terrific piece last year on how to take better holiday photographs with a simple piece of advice: print your pictures. "We are in danger," he wrote, "of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted." He's right.