Todays Digital Images

The photo above is from a collection of around 100,000 negatives rescued from an auction house after the contents of a storage locker was sold for non-payment of storage fees.  The woman who created the images had died and no one knew they existed until the contents of the locker was sold.

It begs the question, what will happen to the vast amount of digital images produced today if there is no physical representation of the image?  Are Flicker, Facebook and Photobucket the new storage lockers that we can look to to find amazing material 60 years from now?  Will the hard drives of our loved ones be preserved for posterity?  How many of us have thrown away old digital storage media because we either didn't think it was important and didn't want to take the time find out or just didn't have a way to read the "obsolete" format it was on?

Sometimes the only way of looking to the past is the physical paper record.  Bound original copies of newspapers exist in many libraries or they may have microfilm copies.  The original images are long gone that are contained in the publication.  There are exceptions, but I think it's important to understand that if we really care about preserving the digital images we produce today, something needs to be done to preserve them other than having them on a hard drive.

Click on the link below to be taken to the web site about the images:

http://www.vivianmaier.com/