michaelsimon:

I’m a professional photographer who makes tens of thousands of digital images a year, for at least the past 8 years. I’ve never lost anything and I manage all of my archives fairly well. It does take work and planning to make sure everything is safe.

How do most other folks manage their digital images? I mean, folks like that lady at her kids football game, or that dude taking the picture of the squirrel on his NYC vacation.

My parents bought a new IBMpcThing every year for like 10 years because  their machine would descend into disease or become possessed by devils. When they tossed the old machine they would also just shrug their shoulders and give up on all of the files as well. Those images literally have no existence anymore. My parents still have thousands of negatives in boxes, slowly decaying, but they still have them and can easily deal with them at any time.

Are we losing huge amounts of our visual history to bad file management/neglect/apathy/whatever?

i’ve been processing negs since i was 10 and i have pretty much lost every negative i’ve ever taken. does this bother me? that the negatives that won me scholarships and fellowships and placement in curated shows and museums are no longer accessible?

no. this does not have impact beyond superficial nostalgia (nostalgia is always superficial, or at least blasphemes the present state of things), nor does it impact the things i’ve seen as they relate to my recall. we take pictures so that others might see what we saw (and to remind ourselves of the importance of seeing), to include others in the narrative of our either paltry or splendifoustastic lives or perverse manic-depressive allegory. sometimes we shoot with the sole purpose of sharing, sometimes we shoot with godspoken urgency. other times we depress the button just to see and we can take it or leave it. which is to say that a photograph is just an amalgam of proxies.

all babies utilize the bottle or the breast. all babies are physically weaned in some way.

let it be known that i am totally wrong about everything i have said, in certain situations.