I read an article recently that revealed some shocking statistics. It was the results of a nationwide US survey of our photography habits for 2016. According to this survey 90% of all photographs last year were taken by smartphones. Whats more 40% of people say they NEVER print any of their images, preferring to keep their photographs in digital format.
It is estimated that 87% of all photographs taken in 2016 never got printed.
It was this final statistic that not only shocked me but got me thinking.
In this age where everything is stored on the web or in the cloud why are we trusting our most precious moments and memories to survive the test of time solely in their digital format?
What will happen 40 or 50 years down the line?
Will they still be around?
If we are gone, will our children or our children’s children be able to access them, let alone find them?
Will this generation of children grow up wondering where the records of their childhood, relatives, holidays and special occasions have gone?
It’s a sobering thought isn’t it?
I love to look at old photographs from my parents past and images of my brothers and I as children. Memories come flooding back as I recall the holidays we had. A smile crosses my face as I look at the faded black and white photographs of my grandparents, aunts and uncles who are now sadly gone.
Are we unknowingly robbing this generation of such things?
As a photographer who came over from film to digital, I love and appreciate the physical photograph. There is nothing better than the little 6×4 image. It’s a tagible object that can be stored in an album on the bookshelf and taken down at a whim just to browse through the pictures and take a nostalgic walk down memory lane.
Yet I too am still guilty of not printing enough of my images.
For the majority of the time they are kept hidden away on hard drives. When they do get viewed its usually only by me when I want to find a particular image.
You would think I’d have learnt my lesson, having been the victim of not one but two hard drive failures. One failure where I lost every image on the drive the second where I was lucky enough to get all the images recovered for a costly fee.
I realised as I was writing this article that if anything were to happen to me, apart from my most recent images that are stored on my laptop, most of the photographs I have taken over the past ten years would probably never see the light of day.
They would be lost to my family and my wife and daughter because they were on one password protected hard drive or another. Or they were stored as RAW files which to anyone who is a non photographer is a complete mystery.
Imagine what it would be like for my daughter to grow up without any photographs from her early years. Never seeing the pictures of herself as she learned to crawl, to walk, to run. Images of her first visit to a beach or her first holiday over seas. She would never see the photographs of her mummy and daddy holding her and loving her. And the fun family times we had with each other would just be fading memories.
I must admit the thought of that brakes my heart.
For our own sake, for our children’s sake and for our children’s, children’s sake we need to address this issue. We all need to take action and start printing our photographs. I’m not saying go out and print everything you shoot but print enough so that if the unthinkable happens and all your digital images somehow become inaccessible then you still have something tangible to show for all your years of shooting.
I know from now on in, I for one will be printing a whole lot more.
