If I am correct, most serious photographers like their work to last. Just like fine art photographers only print on FB Paper, or lightfast pigment sets and would never be seen printing their work on canvas.
I can see if one submits negatives and prints to the Library of Congress or some state repositories for the HABS project, everything has to be developed to a certain set of standards.
Negatives and prints are tested to see if there is residual chemistry in the film and paper. The negatives are submitted in non buffered thumb tabbed envelopes with a number and letter sequence to identify them on the “index”; the contact prints are inserted onto photo mount cards and the same number letter sequence is written on the back of the print as well as the card. The index ( which is a brief description of the image – what it is, direction taken – it is keyed into a sketch map, showing the subject where the camera was and the direction. Everything is submitted on archival bond paper.
Usually the photographer is accompanied by the person tasked with the project and told which views to take. The film and paper prints are transmitted, and the person involved is the person to draw the sketch, write up the specialized index, number and tag everything. These photographs are part of a larger submission.
There’s the large technical paper that is transmitted along with the photographs, and any historic imagery, maps, site plans and other rephotographed things that made the place important. Like a National Register submission, and photographic documentation, the essay is specific in scope. It details the historic significance of the site and why it is being photographed. This report might detail it is the last surviving building done by a famous architect or it is the only building left, an important view, or that George Washington’s horse slept there. If you know Providence RI you’re probably wondering when the superman building will be gone and all that is left is photographic evidence.
The HABS report memorializes the site. Places change, buildings come and go, people forget. If one drives around the state roads of Rhode Island you might see places that time forgot. You’ll see roadside picnic spots designed and built for the new American car culture, the official state terminology for these sites are “groves” and they were built during and before World War 2. In the 1980s these spots were decommissioned and given back to their towns and cities to maintain and keep as public space, some are maintained better than others, they’re nearly all gone, or the towns are letting them fade, be forgotten so they can build something else there, no one cares, no one will remember anyways. Kind of like changing the name of your country and language so no one can read historic texts, or changing the name of a car dealership or your business so no one remembers that it was them who bilked everyone.
What if photography wasn’t really meant to be anything else than an image that faded like these picnic groves, like the old farm whose grave yard and stone fence meandering through the woods is the only thing left, what if it is OK to let the photographs, the ones that are not submitted as a graphic detail and stay in a climate controlled room under lock and key like a national treasure, what if photographs that Aunt Millie took, that we all took, with our instamatics and Polaroid sx-70s. What if all grandma’s old “penny-post cards” and snapshots from days gone by, the albumen prints and cabinet cards, the platinum prints on the wall, and portraits in the small Bakelite and leather cases were all supposed to fade like everything else.
As a species we are terrible at remembering. We repeat the same dumb mistakes over and over again since the beginning of time. New parents forgot how tired and miserable they were after their first child was born only to do it again, and again, and look at the middle and near east, it’s enflamed in a war that was established since before the People of Urartu were at Lake Van.
why should photographers really care that their work might fade or should fade? is it because photographers are vain and think their paper prints should be the only thing that survives? Does it really matter?
I am in both camps.
I grew up looking at old photographs and printed matter. The 1973 Guinness Book of World Records and World Book Encyclopedia and watching old movies changed my life ( like things shown on UHF and at “The Ground Round”. From that point on I wanted to photograph things to learn from, document the world around me and people. I studied ancient ruins and art and architectural history and mentored with a portraitist and book binder and learned how to memorialize these things using paper and light sensitive salts and sunlight.
but I grew up with printed matter. I thumbed and leafed through old yellow newspapers, books that had brittle pages, old faded photographs from grandma’s Samonite suitcase, the cabinet card that memorialized unknown people from an unknown place, muted images in Polaroid Picture Cube, 8mm films of my dad’s and aunts from the 1930s. There’s something beautiful about a brittle page or a faded photograph. It’s like wandering in the woods and finding an old stone wall or a dilapidated picnic grove, or a falling down building covered with vines, it’s why I sometimes make things that don’t last.
I sometimes call these photographs kinetic or ephemeral because it really doesn’t matter, no one will remember anyways.
