Explaining Images

When I see extensive writing that attempts to explain imagery almost to the point of defense, I’m often reminded of Martin Mull’s insightful quote: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.”  Dan Winters - Road to Seeing

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Whither digital images?

My Flickr albums

While we undoubtedly live in the most documented era of human history, it saddens me that these pixelated dispatches will be as fleeting as the moments they captured. So few hard copies of these images exist; they are simply floating in the ether. Maintaining digital archives requires constant attention and is a chore for any professional, let alone the casual image-maker whose archives, in all likelihood, will cease to exist when they die.

Dan Winters - Road to Seeing 

Many should rightly disappear, but I suppose it might be a matter of where photos are stored.  I have a couple thousand images at Flickr that I expect have been archived by Yahoo (now owned by Verizon).  These and millions of others like them are surely of some value, perhaps even monetary value, to future consumers and researchers.  The amount of memory required to store them is minimal.  Why wouldn't a hosting company hold onto them, even if their creators don't?  Might digital images prove longer lasting than anything printed to paper?

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