Condemned to repeat it yet again
In the Future, We Will Photograph Everything and Look at Nothing
You would think that somebody who opens his spiel with a quote from Susan Sontag's 1977 On Photography might have just a smidgen of historical perspective on the subject of people taking photos, but apparently not.
Was there not an expression A Polaroid Moment? - and that discussion of the term indicates that it was preceded by the expression A Kodak Moment.
Quite apart from the C19th woezery about the likely effects of this dread new technology on ART, I bet the invention of cheap cameras that anybody could use and people standing around in groups before sights of interest while someone clicked away with their Box Brownie came in for a certain amount of jeremiahing.
What the new digital technology may achieve, an archivist writes - though I have concerns about durability issues - is that it may, through automatic or very simple tagging, obviate that heart-sinking discovery of masses and masses of photos, undated, no indication of where they were taken, and any individuals in them unidentified. I have had collections to catalogue which included a large number of photographs of considerable interest concerning a particular medically-related activity but which one could only hazard perhaps the general decade by hairstyles, skirt lengths, furnishings, etc. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2426831.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
comments.