Photostalgia

In the past year or so, the technostalgic impulse vis-a-vis photography that I have written about previously on this blog has manifested itself in several new guises. Two recent exhibitions in the UK have been particularly exemplary of the increased attention that is being paid by curators and other arts programmers to the materialities of analogue photography: ‘The Photographic Object’ at The Photographers’ Gallery in London and ‘The Lost Art of the Picture Library’, first shown at the Guardian newspaper’s new premises in King’s Place, London, and subsequently at the University Gallery at Northumbria University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Inside ‘the image factory’*

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.

Technostalgia and tangibility II

In early November I attended the 23rd annual CHArt conference, which this year bore the title Digital Archive Fever – as precise a diagnosis of my own current condition as any. For me, the most interesting contribution came from Doireann Wallace, a PhD student at the Dublin Institute of Technology, who is doing some important work on the dissemination and exploitation of stock photography through online image banks à la Corbis and Getty Images. Focusing her paper on a close reading of Getty’s online operations, Doireann touched on a section of this website which utterly fascinated me and which I immediately wanted to explore in more detail.