In this video on the birth of instant photography, there’s a short piece of archive footage from the 1950s that shows partygoers gathering round the back of the first Polaroid Land camera to see the picture develop, and they have the same expressions that we use nowadays while gaggling around a digital camera’s LCD screen. Touching little echo which makes instant photography all the more endearing. http://videos.howstuffworks.com/discovery/29594-invention-the-first-polaroid-camera-video.htm
Hoorah hoorah, new films for the Polaroid SX-70 instant camera. Love the story behind this company and can't wait to get my hands on the new monochrome films, which are apparently on sale later this week – bet they sell out in hours!
She hands me a manila envelope, tipping it to spill old slides and prints into my hands. "Have you scanned these in?" I ask. "I don't know how," she says. "Then they don't exist," I reply. It's bedroom-level profundity, but I surprise myself by believing it more than a little bit.
I pick up a photo of her father. He's spread out on a bed with his shirt off, his infant daughter sleeping in a bundle on the floor beside him. The little tab in the corner of the print says "1982".
"My mom never liked having that picture of him in the album," she says. "She thought he looked too sexy." I tilt the picture in my hands just a bit until I can see the scratches on the matte surface. There are hundreds of little indentions, tracks from fingernails showing the many times the photo has been held.
When we scan this picture in those scuffs will disappear. The rest of the world will see only the young, bearded man smiling in some sepia living room. They'll increment the file's viewcount by one, leaving their own perfect hash mark. It won't be the same as the photo I'm holding in my hands, shifting in the light to read its physical metadata, but it won't be inferior, either.
A very thought-provoking piece of sad-but-beautiful writing about digital memories by Joel Johnson for Gizmodo. Worth reading in full.
Just because you can document and share nearly every moment of your life doesn't mean you should. Stop worrying so much about stealing away with an image or a clip that perfectly crystallizes the night, like a trophy to collect, another document to catalog, and just experience it. Enjoy it. There's not a camera on the planet that can capture the way a concert makes you feel. Take one picture. Mark the occasion. Then put your goddamn camera down.
YES! This. I went to a Black Kids gig in Manchester early last year, and apart from being the oldest person in the room (not kidding) I also felt very out of place for not having a mobile or compact in my hand, filming the entire gig. What do they all do with all these videos?
I saw a factoid today that the amount of data captured/created by humans in 2009 surpasses the amount of data captured/created by humans in all years up to 2009, and I can well believe it.
