I don’t want to sound like a winy photolab owner, but I am a winy photolab owner, and I’m sore about this subject. Why don’t we make prints like we used to? Now, I get the whole idea with digital photography is that it encourages self-reliance, but I’ll agrue that printing at home does not do good images justice. I’ve got the greatest printing technology in the world, right here on Market St, and yet there are billions of images out there stuck on hard drives. I’m worried without a physical record that these important images will be deleted not just from computers, but from memory (brain). Hey, this is why we keep shoeboxes! To me, unearthing an old photo from the closet beats finding something on a subfolder, within a subfolder. Do we only want to leave a digital record behind?? There is nothing like the tactile sensation of holding, and touching a photographic image. I don’t want my son rubbing his fingers on an image of me on a laptop 50 years from now. Besides electronic images don’t fade, and where’s the fun in that?
photoworks san francisco
musings on photography and photolab ownership
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I could not agree with you more about finding that old shoebox that has been buried in your closet and you come across photographs that stir up those dormant memories. A year ago I had to help move my mother out of her apartment and my family lived in this apartment complex for over 20 years. Cleaning out the closet, I found an old suitcase and inside were all these wonderful black & white and color prints of my grandfather and grandmother and their friends at a jazz club in the 1940’s, their 25th wedding anniversary and pictures of my mother when she was a baby. It was wonderful to see them young, laughing and having a great time and it meant more because both my grandparents have passed away and I was very close to them. I truly believe it is more meaningful to be sitting on the floor going through your family photos than having them stored away in a file on your computer you WILL evetually delete because you need more space.