I see that Google is going to put Life’s archive online, and that 97% of the photos have never been seen by the public. Photos of Life
released from the morgue
triggered a small flashback to another act of kindness I experienced in New York — which many think of, and which sometimes likes to think of itself, as a hard-assed sort of place.
I walked into the New York Post, off the street, and said I was a student visiting for the summer, interested in photography, and could I take a look at the photo archive. I expected
whaddaya, crazy or what?
but my neck and my ancestry opened doors unexpectedly. Indeed, they were flung open. I forget now if it was Ben Bradlee whose mother came from the “old country” … it was one of those moments where the traffic lights have been rigged to speed one past the usual obstacles. Before I knew it I was alone in a what seemed, at first, a kind of magical catacomb stuffed with history.
Looking back, it was a kind of scriptorium, a repository of precious memory. I suppose it must have become completely obsolete long since. A digital version may have the same content but history had a physical presence in that place.
Each of the serried ranks of boxes, from floor to ceiling, had a label: Kennedy Inauguration. Cuban Missile Crisis. Kennedy Assasination, Nixon Resignation and so on. Going through the shoeboxes of history, reading the photographer’s or printer’s notes on the back of prints, seeing which negatives have been used and when, handling things first created at the time of the events they documented, created a powerful feeling of connection.
The 97% of the photographs one doesn’t see, ordinarily, up to now, was part of that, of course. One could follow in the steps of the photographer, roll by roll, frame by frame.
I was drawn to and spend some hours on photographs taken during World War II. Of these, the most unforgettable were those of the liberation of Auschwitz, where I followed the photographer from the moment he entered the place, and thereafter footstep by footstep, each photograph connected to the one that went before. The effect was profoundly, indescribably different from the few photos I’d seen in history books. It was as overwhelming as the photographer’s notes indicated, in places, the stench was. Will history through the viewfinder look the same on Google? I am not sure.
I have mixed feelings about the end of silver halide based photography. Yes, it stank, though that was part of its charm, at times. I’m of the generation for whom a whiff of fixer was evocative and exciting, like “napalm in the morning” perhaps? It had a kind of integrity in the world before Photoshop.
John Seely-Brown and Paul Duguid have a wonderful account in The Social Life of Information of an historian tracing the progess of an 18th century cholera epidemic by smelling postmarked letters for the aroma of vinegar, information that would not be captured by scanning the documents.
I’m reminded too, that we have six boxes of unquestionably historic documents that we have banished somewhere because we just didn’t have house room for them.
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Within minutes, headline news about digitally altered photograph: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7738342.stm
Methinks it’s something about the tangible – with google and wikipaedia, wonderful though they be, one’s never entirely sure of the provenance – and with opinion being everything, well that’s yet another tangent. My point, if you can call it that, is that my kids are unlikely to know the thrill of the chase, the hunt and finally getting their hands on some archived document dating back ? centuries, to gain one piece of information, as referenced, but not cited, by a later source. Given the increasing ease of finding obscure stuff on-line, just how long are theses now going to be?
I have a hunch that we may see digital archaeology emerge within our lifetime, and even computers making unexpected connections between different archives. Then of course we shall have people planting digital truffles!
What a wonderful story, Wombats, and what a chance to see history at first hand, unfiltered and raw. And how fantastic that a similar archive of experience and wisdom is being opened up to the wider world.
I’m not one of those who fears the death knell of history within the digital age, or sees a decline in the vigour of historical research resulting.
In the past, information was always available but accessible only to those who had the luxury of location (close to the archive), time (long hours of scouring the shelves) and money (the means to spend that kind of time).
There were relatively few kinds of history. There was that kind in the textbooks, and, er… that was about it.
Now those restrictions have been lifted and all that has changed. Information is available much more widely, and many more different interpretations and nuances of history may be gained.
In criticising Google or Wikipedia, it’s all too easy to forget that just fifteen years ago the readily available information was limited to the few reference books we might own – typically a much more limited and one-dimensional resource with few pointers to further reading.
I think the scale of the paradigm shift is easy to underestimate. It’s almost like comparing space travel with walking. There’ll always be more details to see on foot, but the Shuttle undeniably gives an infinitely wider view.
You’ll get no disagreement from me! I really wouldn’t want to go back to the darkroom, although in retrospect it was one of the places where I experienced a timeless sort of zenlike peace — that looking- down-on-the-clouds contentment on a long haul flight when you’ve had a drink and you look up from a good book and life seems pretty good or… well, I’m sure you’ve been there, but those are two of mine.
Of course the cost of materials, for a student, was always a consideration. One more print? How many sheets left? That’s the other truly liberating thing about digital.