Filing My Paranoia Away
Monday, January 12, 2015
Today I delivered 25 photographs that I took last week for a good client of mine. They pay me well. I arrived with a small thumb drive. I prefer, when possible to deliver my photographs in person and not by the more efficient but still impersonal Dropbox.
The act made me think of an interview I heard on the way
on CBC Radio by guest Damain Abraham. The person interviewed was Stephen Bulger who runs the Stephen Bulger Gallery in Toronto. Recently the gallery had mounted a show of photographs taken by Vivian Maier a virtual unknown while alive who has become most famous since her many thousands of film negatives were discovered in a storage locker.
Bulger said that her pictures, because they were found as negatives and or unprocessed black and white film could be seen as they were saved. Had they been found as digital images in some sort of digital storage device, the chances that they would have been looked at were not good. Bulger made use of a word that haunted me the whole day. He said that those images were “fugitive” and perhaps after some years they would have been gone.
Bulger said that her pictures, because they were found as negatives and or unprocessed black and white film could be seen as they were saved. Had they been found as digital images in some sort of digital storage device, the chances that they would have been looked at were not good. Bulger made use of a word that haunted me the whole day. He said that those images were “fugitive” and perhaps after some years they would have been gone.
I have SyQuest’s and Zip Drives of photographs and
photographic layouts given to me by the many art directors I worked for. I am
not able to open any of them.
Some years ago the Presentation House Gallery brought the
head of the archives of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She told us
that they were using as many methods available to record for posterity a record
of the museum collection. They were using film cameras, digital cameras and
huge scanners. She told us she was unsure of what methods would still be around
in half a century.
Since I began shooting with a Fuji X-E1 in August 2013 I
have been unsure on how to store my photographs. I have them in a large folder
called Fuji Photo File in two backed up exterior hard drives. I am seriously
thinking on investing in smaller storage cards and using also those as backups.
Another idea is to purchase small thumb drives and store in each one a
particular shoot. I would then store those thumb drives and or storage cards in
a regular hanging file in one of my regular four-drawer ( I have 14) metal
filing cabinets alongside the negatives, slides and photographs that I began to
take in the late 50s.
Not too long ago I would ask my Focal Point students in
what ways they could go home after a photo session to find that there was
nothing there. I was most depressed by their varied answers.
In my trip to Buenos Aires in September 2013 I traveled
with three film cameras and my digital Fuji. I brought along an ancient but
very good Toshiba laptop. I had two Fuji camera batteries and four storage cards.
Every day I would download into a thumb drive the pictures of the day using the
Toshiba as the go-between. I never filled any of the cards but I switched them
randomly every day. I arrive home with all the pictures I had taken.
Illustrating today’s blog are two photographs that almost
did not make it. A few years ago I photographed my indomitable friendly
dominatrix, Yuliya. I photographed her in the home of a friend who had many
interesting artfacts in an apartment with lovely furniture and priceless
carpets. I photographed her with three Nikon FM-2 cameras. One had colour
negative film, a second one 100 ISO b+w film and the third camera Kodak b+w
Infrared Film. I also shot some 6x7 cm pictures with my Mamiya RB. After the
shoot was over while putting my cameras away the back of the camera with the
infrared film opened most suddenly when it fell from a chair.
I could have just thrown the film away. But I took it
home and processed it. Every frame has a light leak. But with my scanner I have
been able to record some interesting ones. What you see here are scans where I
lay the film on the scanner (without a film holder so they don’t lay flat). I scanned
them as if they were documents from the bottom of the scanner and reversed the
images to make the positives. From there I went to Corel X2 to Photo Effect and
chose Cyanotype. I worked a tad with contrast and levels.
The pictures did make it and of that I am satisfied. When I glance at my 14 filing cabinets,
knowing well what could happen if my basement had a fire I realize (smugly)
that this kind of paranoia does not hit people like me but more so all those
photographers who exclusively shoot with one (as in one) digital camera and
thus have all their eggs (digital as they may be) in one basket. Cloud or no
cloud I would feel paranoid, too.
Yuliya the dominatrix
The dominatrix smiles
Yuliya the dominatrix
The dominatrix smiles
