July 12, 2009
The one that got away
Kelsey asked a while ago why we take pictures. My answer was to learn how to see and think. Barry quoted Garry Winogrand saying: I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed. Barry’s own answer was equally nuanced.
I took too many pictures with my first dSLR (this statement is complete self-defense; I don’t believe a word of it). The truth is, I love taking pictures — and, I feel somewhat embarrassed by that. The learner’s fear of showing work in progress — a smitten’s doubt whether he has the right. Of the thousands of photos I took with that camera I whittled them down to three. It was a good exercise. One that furthered the process of learning to see and think.
A month or so back, my laptop went out. I wasn’t too worried about it at the time because I have a large external drive I backed everything up to. Looking through my Lightroom archive, though, I realized a couple days ago that something was wrong. A whole stretch of images were grayed out, a subtle question mark in the upper right hand corner.
I couldn’t figure it out. I allowed myself to think this was a simple misunderstanding — that somehow the images, the folders that contained them, somehow had been misplaced — that in the setting up of the refurbished laptop, the images had been waylaid.
What I am beginning to realize, however, is that the sequence of images (from which, one of the three I am most pleased) must have been imported directly onto the original laptop hard drive, rather than to the external drive, where all the other images were stored. When the laptop crashed I didn’t worry about it — I knew those images were safe.
As I told Amy, there are thousands of images among that batch I would gladly trade to have that single image back. It’s not that I lost a few hundred images from among thousands — it’s that I lost one of the three I most loved.
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5 Responses to “The one that got away”
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I’m kept awake at night sometimes by the thought that so much information has been poured into storage so much less definite than boxes and drawers.
As for the why of photographs: I take pictures like a dumbass writes a poem.
I lost the only audio file I had of my grandmother before alzheimers really got to her. That makes me want to die, I’m so angry at myself, I just want to hear her voice one last fucking goddamn time when she knew what my name was. When someone dies who knows who you are, shit. Someday, everyone who knows who I am will be dead, and no one will know who I was.
I have had digital files break down – I guess one day I will lose a negative and be sad. I try not to spend too much time worrying about the archiving of such things. You do what you do, you hope its enough. If it’s not, well, you’ll never forget the image.
It’s odd really, digital has made us think more about backups etc – when it was only film we were dealing with it was just negatives, we didn’t get ‘em copied they just existed in a box or a file. Now, we have raid drives and the like, I guess we have never been so protected and yet, I feel safest with my film.
I’ve never lost anything that mattered. If I ever do I’ll be sure to report here how I feel.
A 2005 look at the challenges of preserving digital photographs.
Back up, back up, back up……..
This is the age not of digital photography but the age of lost images.