[Reader-list] Twilight of the color photo As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing more than shoe boxes full of mementos

[Taha Mehmood]

Dear All

The essay below discusses photography in general and the
transformation of technology from print to digital in particular. I
think it would be fruitful to bear in mind that MNIC will store
digital photographs. The data will be recorded in a chip which would
be placed inside the plastic card.

Regards

Taha

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/01/04/twilight_of_the_color_photo/?page=full

 Twilight of the color photo As printed snapshots vanish, we're losing
more than shoe boxes full of mementos

ONE HUNDRED YEARS ago, one of Paris's richest men had a quixotic
dream. Returning from a personal trip to China and Japan, the banker
Albert Kahn decided to build a huge visual archive of the planet. Kahn
believed that mutual misunderstanding was the source of world
conflict, so in 1909, he began funding scores of photographers as they
set out across five continents. By the time the Great Depression
finally bankrupted him 22 years later, Kahn's intrepid op??rateurs had
managed to document almost 50 countries, returning to France with 120
hours of film footage and 4,000 black-and-white pictures. This alone
would have been a remarkable legacy, but the real jewels of the
collection were printed on glass, in a full spectrum the world had
never seen. The recently invented technique of the autochrome - which
made portable color photography possible - meant that Kahn's
emissaries could also amass a staggering total of 72,000 color plates.
	Discuss
COMMENTS (15)

Today, Kahn's project - still housed in a suburb west of Paris - is a
stirring and underappreciated monument: the first great work of color
photography. Princeton University Press is marking this centennial
with a beautifully illustrated book. "The Dawn of the Color
Photograph" is a handsome document full of lush and memorable images.
Most of us still picture 1909 exclusively in black and white, so it's
a revelation to peer back 100 years and see such eerily bright hues.
French soldiers - dressed inadvisably in red, white, and blue - carve
trenches through the verdant countryside; members of the Indian
aristocracy, though recently stripped of power, still gather for a
portrait wrapped in a defiant regalia of lavender, gold, maroon, and
orange. Back in its heyday, the Moulin Rouge is pictured truly red.
The most poignant autochromes - the really haunting ones - are those
where the richness of color fixes people whose ways of life are
unwittingly on the verge of extinction: Farmers, shepherds, and
weavers all stand still as their tools and costumes enter the
afterlife through a revolutionary new medium.

In the years since Kahn sent his crews out with thousands of pounds of
coated glass, the color print has evolved from an expensive novelty
into an affordable, nearly ubiquitous object. What used to take
specialists many painstaking hours can now be done by machine in a
matter of seconds; 30 cents now buys an accurate, glossy color the
likes of which the wealthy Kahn could only have dreamed of. As an
object, the color print has finally been perfected. And yet, the 100th
anniversary of Kahn's project isn't so much a triumphant moment as an
elegiac one. Like the shepherds, the color print has nearly vanished.
Today, you get some glossies sent out as holiday cards, and some lucky
ones get matted and framed, but the vast majority of color photographs
now taken - and there are countless millions of them - pass before us,
just briefly, on a screen.

Our rituals have already shifted. We no longer hand vacation photos
around patiently at dinner parties. If we do reach for our photo
albums, the collections start to thin out around 2006. Family pictures
migrated from our desktop to our "desktop," and showing off a wallet
photo is suddenly very rare. Instead, we flip open to the snap on our
cellphones, where our beloved's low-res face competes brightly with
the time, date, and number of bars. (Many of our friends are smiling
away inside that camera phone.)

Printing is still just as easy and cheap as it ever was, but given the
option, we now prefer to save - or upload - instead. That tells us
something about our appetite for convenience, but even more about what
we want from photographs in the first place. The object itself, no
matter how crisp and permanent, how lush or mysterious, turns out to
matter less than our ability to capture, store, and share an image.
Without the print, photography's magical power - to freeze a moment in
time - is still ours. In fact, although we continue to think of the
photograph as a physical thing, we are finding out that it better
serves our needs without being printed.

But as with each of our advances, something else is being lost. It is
easy to think of the print and the digital image as the same thing,
but they're actually very different. Even as cameras tout their
ever-increasing megapixels, nearly everything we view is projected out
at 72 dots per inch, the standard resolution of a monitor. The
resulting pictures are back-lit, vivid, and very easy to scan, so we
hardly notice how hard it is to look into them. Your eyes move side to
side, and you can easily gather all the information, but if you linger
for a minute - an actual minute - you'll notice that the screen
doesn't quite accept your gaze. A printed photograph, however - even
when small, or blurry - has a way of letting you in. The paper surface
is less aggressive than the liquid crystal one, so your eyes can roam
around. The brightness of the pixel has a price: The illusory space of
the photo is subtly reduced, along with its invitation to wander - or
simply rest - inside it.

Of course, the real space photographs take up is also reduced. Like
most technology, the color print seemed ever so sleek . . . until we
saw the upgrade. A laptop effortlessly holds what hundreds of shoe
boxes could not; we now send 50 pictures with a click. Still, the
actual third dimension is an important aspect of the supposedly 2D
print; the physical contact establishes a certain intimacy. Who has
not held a photograph and wept? Who hasn't felt their nostalgia settle
for an instant on the thinness of a print? To hold a photo is to hold
a person, or even a place, in your hand - a momentary illusion that
has no parallel on a monitor.

The digital gems we hoard can number in the thousands, or even in the
tens of thousands. Of course, the idea is that any and all of them
could be printed, if an occasion were to arise. But what would that
special day be like? Years pass, and it never comes. The prospect of
printing them all out becomes unthinkable. The reason they never turn
into objects is precisely because these photos have already served
their purpose: At the party, which we wished would go on forever, we
posed and we clicked. Then we showed each other the little LCD screen,
and we were satisfied - the moment would last. (A little while later,
we repeated the ritual.)

But just as the paperless format erases one kind of closeness, it can
open entirely new realms of intimacy - the minute you hit "upload."
While our stored photos are shy (you have to search for them) and a
little vulnerable (they can all disappear with a hard drive), the ones
we put on the Web are gregarious and immortal. Never before has the
photo been so emphatically public, announcing our achievements and
pleasures with a swiftness we never dreamed of. So even when these
disseminated images come to haunt us, it's not in the manner of the
print - which conjured private sentiments, like longing or regret -
but with rather more civic feelings, like shame and embarrassment.
Usually these unnerving photos are the ones other people have posted
(and "tagged"), but what's really irksome is that other people are
seeing them, and that these other people can even copy them and
distribute them, if they so choose. The old idea of "destroy the
negatives" sounds pretty quaint in a world of endlessly reproducible
jpegs, as does the notion of asking to take someone's picture. We're
all celebrities now! But it is the photographs, not their subjects,
that are godlike in their movements.

The lowly print, meanwhile, can only exist in one place at a time.
It's easily damaged, or hidden, or lost. In these weaknesses, however,
lies a particular charm. Only a few years have passed, and we already
wax nostalgic about the old processes. Remember when you used to have
to wait? The premeditation is gone, as well as the anticipation,
investment, and surprise. The photograph is less of an occasion. Don't
worry, we can take another one! In the era of prints, the image was
just part of the photograph. The carefully avoided thumbprints, the
unfortunate creases, the ugly red digital date stamps - we will come
to miss these subtle markings. Hold them by the edges! But the new
images don't even have edges - they're all front. It has become common
for critics and artists to mourn the passing of particular formats -
the Polaroid, the Lomo, or the Kodachrome - but these eulogies only
scratch the proverbial surface. What we will really miss is the print
itself.

It seems strange that this long-awaited miracle - this icon of modern
life - would even have a life span. But after a century of printing
full color images of our lives, the habit is quietly dying out. Of
course, hobbyists and art schools will keep the techniques alive.
Liberated from utility, the photograph is already following other
antiquated printing processes - like engraving and lithography - into
the domain of craft and fine art. And old-fashioned photos will
probably still be employed, like wax seals and letter-press
invitations, to commemorate special occasions.

But Kahn's haunting autochromes - which are cracked and worn,
imperfect, fragile, and well traveled - should remind us that there is
magic when the object itself, not just the occasion, is special.
Whether they have crossed continents, or just sat in somebody's
pocket, even the flimsiest photographic prints take on a certain
weight. As they fade from use, we can start to sense what these
objects really did: They carried feelings their images didn't intend,
feelings that mattered more than anyone knew at the time.

Dushko Petrovich, a painter and critic, is the resident fellow in
painting at Boston University and the founding editor of Paper
Monument.