A Century of Taking Pictures

Once upon a time, eons ago, in the 90s, humanity finally had the support it deserved to store its records. For ever. Or so suggested the advertisements. Away with self-erasing VHS tapes, begone mpeg-1 pixelated VCDs, to the museum, the 30 cm-wide laser discs. Don’t forget to recycle these K7. Photos, on paper? Really? Put them into a picture frame, digital of course. The only thing you have to do is to store this new support properly, obviously. Of course (theatrical sigh), the recording technology will have to remain stable so that you can play or show it back. But still, DVD is for “a life time”. And so, at the dawn of the digital age, 30 years ago, we moved our photo albums, our personal movies, our movie libraries to digital formats.

And then it turned out that DVDs would live for 30 years, and last for 200 years, at a stretch, with the very latest tech (of course), and obviously, if you do not use it….

I think about that a lot, shovelling through century-old albums, reels and pictures.

It is sometimes an uneasy feeling when I come across material that, though antique in look, feel and subject, seems surprisingly fresher and sharper than pictures taken 20 years back. For sure, far fresher than VHS films that look as if pirated in a theatre with a hand camera. Sharper than smudged 80s instant Polaroids fading under my very eyes. So yes, digital saved memories, but which, and for how long? As a society, we operate on the fundamental premise that nothing is truly worth keeping except the distant Past.

We create more and more content, and store it in ever expanding data bunkers. On the premise that we will lose more of it, potentially faster and faster.

We used to chisel out names and pictures on walls. Only a century ago.

For some, formats have an aura of sentimentality. Vinyl’s have made a comeback because of that “crackling” sound. And the record crates for parties, instead of an Apple notebook. Look and feel, I get it. But for me, honestly? It is a performance, hipster snobbery dropped a bridge too far. Maybe it is just me, but content beats medium. And yes, photo albums have unique smells, tactile feels, and frame pictures perfectly in a specific time. But, just show me what you want me to see.

And so, in the archaeological dig that my office has become, there is a chronological hiccup, a memory chasm between the 1950s and the 90s – a period filled with fading, melting, smudging photos and records.

I watch, mesmerised, cardboard hard-back photos from 150 years ago, as if they were taken yesterday. Or the day before. Yes, the pause is stilted, the suits outmoded, the moustaches proud. The photo composition is conventional. And yet sharp enough to glimpse in the eyes and in the head posture, boredom, mischief or defiance. The photo material in itself is often arresting: double sided printed cardboard, ready-made postcards, acid-etched glass photos. And if not spectacular enough, just the constant evolution of papers, cuts, border styles. The multiplicity of sizes from tiny miniatures to large wall formats: Gulungu waterfalls, That Buffalo, unchanged a century later.

Pair it with today’s technology, and you bring out the best, the real, the details inadvertently, caught and only revealed by that technology.

On the one hand, we are in an arms’ race. 15 years ago, the human eye was supposed not to perceive any difference beyond 8 megapixels. Then cameras went to 12 megapixels, beyond which the human eye cannot perceive any difference. In April 2025, cameras have 150 megapixels definitions, where the human eye… Fine, I get it. And, yes, these technological leaps open up new amazing possibilities.

There is a price to it: voice killed silent, LCD projection tech killed CRT horizontal ray projection (that is why 70s TV show look so… strange), etc… But it also opens up possibilities, like infinitely zooming in pictures.

No human produced format is eternal. I guess that even etching on artificial diamonds can erode, age, as it surely can burn. When I tried to port 8 mm films onto digital support, it came out that hundred year old films have an expiry date. Some of them have what is called, poetically and quite accurately, the “vinegar syndrome”. The film shrinks and bulges. No physical memory is eternal.

There is only dust.

This reverie about memory often spurs me more than the subject itself: you can only watch so many verandas, dogs and cats.

We reach a stage where we combine near-perfect recording and imperfect storage. We create a reality that literally dissolves in front of our eyes. And yet, in that moment where that reality does exist, we can set aside the convention, and spot how it really was back then, through the details of these olds pictures: a comic book dropped on the floor, a photo hanging on the wall, a pith helmet temporarily hung on a chaise longue. Because of that, we actually hand-over always more, while we create more content than ever before.

And yet, this is overwhelmingly for instant, ephemeral consumption. Do we need to remember more than that? That is for someone else to say in a century. In 2125, tomorrow.

Maybe a stone and a chisel is not such a bad idea.

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