Chris D'Amore Photography [018]
On The Importance of Physical Media
A few years ago, I found a cassette I made on a Playskool tape recorder in the mid 90s. It featured 8-year-old me dubbing tracks I curated from my family’s album collection by holding the plastic microphone up to the stereo speaker and adding little thought pieces between them like a latchkey radio DJ. That tape, among others containing impressively surrealist audio variety shows performed by my three siblings, were basically the Dead Sea Scrolls of our late 20th century suburban Massachusetts upbringing. This discovery underscored something I had intuited through my pursuit of film photography since the beginning but had never put into words: the overlooked importance of physical media.
Thus began my internal struggle of how to write about it: Do I take on the Sisyphean task of conveying every way in which tangible formats are crucial to documenting the human experience? Or do I just share the humbling experience of unearthing a mixtape from my childhood in which I fanboy over my favorite musical artist and yacht-rock pioneer, Christopher Cross, in an inexplicable Boston accent? It turns out those two seemingly divergent paths are each hikes up the same mountain.
The photographs (recordings, writings, etc.) we make could be of anything from fleeting candids of one’s personal life to snapshots of a larger cultural movement in its arc through time. They’re often both, and however inconsequential or impactful they may seem at their inception, these moments we find ourselves in may hold a significance only recognized in retrospect. Their preservation is the only way to ensure that significance is realized. These little biographical fragments can be used to piece together meaningful stories for future generations, and when they are curated with intent, their storytelling capacity becomes timeless.
The places where our digital photos end up were never meant to last. Even in ideal conditions, consumer-grade storage media doesn't typically last more than 10 years and is susceptible to file corruption, data loss, and compatibility issues.1 Tech platforms that tout the benefits of the cloud aren’t much better, and the ones that host our images have no stake in their safekeeping. MySpace botched a migration a few years ago that lost 12 years worth of user data.2 Photobucket recently locked down free accounts essentially holding peoples’ images hostage until they paid up.3 Just forgetting a password for an old account could leave memories to rot in digital isolation until eventually deleted.
To be fair, digital media is incredibly useful. (After all, it’s the only way this newsletter could exist.) It’s an efficient way to share your ideas with the world and back up your work, but it should be regarded as a supplemental tool, not a complete solution. As powerful as the internet is for communication in the present, there are major issues with it being a reliable source of historical truth for the future without the context of the ephemeral zeitgeist du jour. The pool of digital knowledge on the internet is tainted with misinformation, altered truths, and completely fabricated relics of the Darkest Timeline ranging from obscure satire to intentional malice. The cultural practice of archiving is always important, but in this era of intense social upheaval, it has become crucial.
Working with film has several benefits. Personally, I work best within limitations, sticking with basic tools and a finite amount of frames to make a deeper connection with the subject instead of being preoccupied by the instrument - it just feels like a more organic process to me. It’s reassuring that the cameras of yesteryear were built to last decades without the need for firmware updates and are still repairable. It can even be a convenient exercise in resisting instant gratification and staying grounded. All of these virtues keep me tethered to the craft, but I consider them secondary to an often overlooked one: the importance of tangible media as a historical document.
One of the most poignant cases for this is the photographer Vivian Maier, a reclusive visionary who created a massive body of work in near-complete privacy, only for it to be discovered posthumously. By day, she worked as a nanny, carrying a camera with her everywhere she went, documenting street scenes in Chicago and New York City for nearly 50 years. Thousands of her negatives were found by sheer luck in a storage unit, then scanned, printed, and shared with the world. The story is an easy one to romanticize: an unknown artist’s sudden discovery sends shockwaves through the art world. There are also moral implications of her work being released publicly after her death and without her permission, but it still stands as an example of what may have been lost otherwise. The documentary about her life, Finding Vivian Maier, can be streamed for free here.
When properly stored, photographic negatives and prints can last decades and even centuries. Libraries, community archivists, and quirky aunts wielding 20-pound family photo albums act as the stewards of our past. From documentary work of major historical events to backyard barbecues - all of it contributes to a collective historical record of our human experience that can be passed on for generations. With photography only being a relatively recent mainstay in our personal lives (~100 years), I think we have yet to see its long-term benefits in regard to cultural learning and understanding. This might be an optimistic take, but at this tumultuous point in history, what choice do we have but to let some of that optimism in?
Film photography has been a common thread for me for over a decade, through difficult, marvelous, and uncertain times. It’s often how I process life in the moment and reflect on it later, and knowing there’s a physical archive I can pass on or donate someday gives me a deeper sense of purpose. It isn’t accessible or interesting for everyone, but we can all still embrace the mindset of building upon our collective cultural memory, whether it’s by archiving your family films and photos, making prints of your digital photos, or even volunteering to be the family curator! Together, whatever we create will add up to a living, breathing body of work in service of future generations that will inherit the world we inevitably shape.
There are so many personal anecdotes I could write about at length thanks to tangible formats: seeing a photo of my grandparents laying on a grassy hillside before they were married, watching 8mm footage of my mom visiting Italy when she was a child, VHS evidence that I blew out the candles on my sister’s 5th birthday cake before she had a chance to… I’m sure the same goes for you, too. We’re at an odd point in history where the pendulum has swung wildly in favor of the latest tech, and the consequences may only become apparent after those formats (and their precious contents) are defunct. Shouldn’t we use every tool we have at our disposal to preserve our stories? Shouldn’t we reject the status quo of hosting our data solely on privately owned infrastructure managed by corporations inextricably linked to political interests and susceptible to the whims of financial incentives? In the grand scheme of things, committing to physical media merely requires the occasional forfeiture of ultra-modern standards and conveniences, but the rewards of sticking with them are invaluable. Without them (and that mixtape), how will my great-great-great-grandchildren know Christopher Cross wrote one of the greatest choruses of all time?
Recently Featured Works & Shameless Plugs:
I’ve been throwing around the idea of putting out a second Lost Memory magazine sometime in the next year or so. There are still a few editions of the first one available here!
Ross and Gus from Palm Press in Medford, MA made some incredible darkroom prints of two of my images seen below. We did a limited edition run of 3 for each image, available now at RedDot Culture.
Sounds From the Studio:
Archive Dive (a random photograph picked via number generator):
Tom Warren, “iOS 11's new image format might pose problems for PC users,” The Verge, September 19, 2017
Matt Binder, “MySpace lost 12 years of music and photos, leaving a sizable gap in social network history,” Mashable, March 18, 2019
Natt Garun, “Photobucket accused of blackmail after quietly requiring users to pay $400 a year to hotlink,” The Verge, July 4, 2017
You couldn’t be more right about the benefits of physical media. We are becoming more detached from the things which have historically defined us (movies, music, images) thanks to the migration to digital content. We thought we wanted ease and digital longevity but all it has done is overstimulate, dilute, and devalue the very thing we were looking to preserve.
Fantastic read! I've been preaching to friends and family for years about storing all of their memories in an iCloud account. At the very minimum we should be storing our stuff on hard drives we own and backed offsite.