Japanese holiday memories discarded.

In a pile of rubbish on an archaeological site a couple of years back I found a number of slides damaged by fire, water, mould and dirt. They are paper mounts without any labelling except for some faint numbers written in red ink.

Someone's holiday photos of their trip to Japan. Lost in a turf-out either by accident, or because they didn't care anymore. The tangible record of a life, discarded and forgotten except for what the stranger sees. Slides are obsolete, but they survive in biscuit tins and filing cabinets, have become a commodity traded for nostalgic value or recycling, or a museum object, or more hopefully, to be treasured as family heirlooms and carefully sorted and identified. Their historical value is well recognised, because they survive the events and the people who made them and which they record. They are transferable to new media, but still remain as things.

Our Japanese holiday photos probably go back to the 1960s or maybe earlier.  They are colour, but all but the reds have faded or been washed out. Kodachrome was marketed from about 1936, but these are probably not Kodachrome or Ektachrome, or developed and mounted by Kodak, but by a smaller independent processing lab.

The views include the Osaka Castle.

      

Another view might be the gateway to Hiroshima Castle gate.

                

And another is small timber shrine or pavilion that I can't identify.

Several views are of formal gardens.

But most had deteriorated so far that it was impossible to tell what they were. 

They had become purely abstract.

There was a brief period in human history when creating images became a universal and democratic activity. From the 1950s, relatively cheap cameras and processing, meant that anyone could take photos, and get the reasonably permanent physical images by sending the film to be developed by the company they bought it from (as with Kodachrome, the price included in the cost of the film) or drop them into the local chemist and pick them up the next day, or even in an hour. Albums and shoeboxes filled up with post card sized prints, while boxes of slides came out for special events. 

Previously, from the early 19th century to at least World War 1, getting a photograph made was a very special event, confined to the documentation of the activities, possessions and status of the rich elite or to only the most notable events in everyone else's lives, such as weddings, or a son in uniform, or a gathering of family.

About 20 years ago, printed photographs became a receding art form.  In 2003 digital cameras outsold film cameras, and the Nikon D70 digital camera was released causing many newspapers to switch to digital. Kodak announced in 2004 that they would cease developing new film products. 

About the same time the standard for digital imagery achieved a similar quality to film, while the convenience and immediacy of digital images tipped the balance. (The digital equivalent of 35mm colour negative or slide images is about 6 megapixel sensors, or 18 megabyte images or 8 megapixels and 24 megabyte images for the higher quality films). In real life, most people never need such quality, whether postcard prints in albums or compressed digital images on facebook or screens most of the higher definition resolution contained in images is lost.

Most of the images themselves will be lost eventually as well. Digital storage is impermanent. Hard drives crash, DVDs fail or are lost, hardly anyone bothers with backup storage. The printed images are equally fragile. Printer inks and papers suffer from light fade, air fade (ozone) and humidity causes inks to run.  Rarely do people get dye sublimation prints on encapsulated archival papers. In fact very few of the billions of digital images taken every year ever get printed.

So when you upgrade your computer without remembering to back up the hard drive, or grandad's old gear goes out in the hard rubbish when you clear out his house, or the bankruptcy of the cloud storage company locks you out of your files, all those images will be lost. But the shoebox of prints and slides in the attic or the old family album at the retro shop will still be there, and in a few hundreds years time historians will wonder at the unique visual record that existed only for half a century at the end of the second millennia of the Common Era.

Watch the Anonymous Project.