The Memory of Photography

Over the past couple of months I have been conducting interviews with people from the picture industry, trying to get a range of insiders’ viewpoints on the transition from analogue to digital production and archiving. My hypothesis – that the work of picture research and archiving is materially altered when carried out via a screen as opposed to in a physical, three-dimensional environment – has to a great extent been confirmed. But each individual’s experience of these changes has clearly been different. Some feel empowered by what they see as better, faster and easier access to photography collections in digitised form, while others emphasise the loss of the materiality of the image and the sensory pleasures of rooting through a roomful of boxes and filing cabinets. Nearly everyone – even those who consider digitisation to be wholly positive thing – express some regret at the loss of the personal interaction between researchers, archivists, photographers and lab technicians that used to characterise the industry in pre-digital days.

The stories told by the people interviewed so far – several of whom got in touch after I posted a request on the industry site Photo Archive News – seem to divide into two camps: those that emphasise the benefits and possibilities of electronic image storage and retrieval, and those that accentuate what they perceive as numerous losses of quality in the transition to digitality. This perceived deterioration of quality applies not only to images (digital files unable to reproduce to the same standard as a film slide or negative, for instance) but also to the working environment and to the performance levels of the younger generation of researchers, who are often said to be ignorant and lacking in both pride and initiative. I haven’t got far enough in my analysis of the interviews to draw any hard and fast conclusions about what digitality ‘means’ to picture researchers, much less how it might affect the future of the industry. But all the practitioners I have spoken to have opened up unique, personal perspectives on the work of picture research which in turn have led me to consider new directions for my own research into this subject.

In the middle of my interview schedule the news broke that Getty Images had instructed an investment bank to assess the possibility of attracting potential buyers for the business. This occasioned a good deal of brouhaha, and forced Getty to issue a guarded statement that it was ‘exploring strategic alternatives’. Whatever this might mean, it got me thinking that if a pioneer of the digital visual content industry like Getty had even begun to consider the idea of selling up to private equity or similar, it might suggest that they think there is limited room for what business people and economics commentators like to call ‘further growth’ in this area. In which case it makes one think about what sort of ‘business model’ might eventually replace it. But what do I know…

* cf. Paul Frosh, The Image Factory: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry (Oxford: Berg, 2003).