Speaking of Obsolescence

Found in a trash bin, New York City

I’m a bit slow sometimes but I just realized the absolute absurdity and irony of the experience I’m about to describe.

As I was walking home from the Obsolescence Panel Discussion on Wednesday night, I encountered a man scavenging through a large metal trash bin. He was pulling out stacks and stacks of 4×5 and 8×10 color transparencies. All the images were crisp, mostly commercial still lives. There were even 4×5 and 8×10 color polaroids. I’m not exaggerating at all when I say that there must of been hundreds and hundreds of photographs, maybe even a couple thousand.

I started looking at the images too, wanting to find a few killer images that were worth taking home. I didn’t have much patience to really dig deep and I also felt bad for the guy who got there first so I took the above chrome home and called it a day.

Looking at the output I saw before me and obviously seeing that a true professional had made the images I wondered who the photographer might be. I quickly glanced at the buzzer panel of the nearest building and knew who had been trashing the work. I don’t think it’s important to say who’s work it was but let’s just say that this is a very successful and well known still life photographer.

Now the questions started coming:

Why was all this stuff thrown out?

Was this stuff archived before it was given the can?

Are these images with a stock house? If not who owned the copyright to them once they had been trashed like this?

I also wondered what the guy taking them out of the garbage expected to do with the images. I asked him and he said he planned to sell them on the street or something.

The funny thing about encountering this situation is that I did a similar thing just a few weeks ago. I needed to clear up some space and I didn’t see the point of keeping some old negatives and chromes of images from crappy jobs I did years ago and that I will never ever want to see again. I made the extra effort to cut up my images before I trashed them but I didn’t throw out nearly as much stuff.

I realize that although I still prefer and enjoy shooting film these days, I much prefer the organization of digital files into a small portable hard drive than collecting negatives and contact sheets into notebooks and boxes. My current system of archiving is mediocre at best and a huge pain to deal with when moving or reorganizing. I do however appreciate that a negative is a physical object and can be looked at and handled where as a digital file can easily get lost in digital hard drive oblivion.

Let’s not even get started with the conversation about what happens when the technology of hard drives becomes obsolete. Anyway, I’m curious what other people are doing these days with their old negatives and what if anything they are doing to preserve their new digital images. Are people out there being smart by archiving their images and storing them in more than one place?

I really hope so.