We are primitive and barbaric

In the history of mankind repeatedly revolutions have been taking place.
Today we focus not on a revolution like the Renaissance that was most of all a spiritual awakening on a large scale.
We give our attention to technological inventions that resulted in revolutions.

Revolution, as the word implies, is intensification in the evolution process.
Getting a boost because a new technological product becomes available.

In photography over the last ten years a revolution has certainly been happening.
The reason is that the invention of the chip and ways to store digital information, has found an excellent place to breed in photography.
In fact it has turned the technique of photography upside down.

It used to be that a photographer used a camera loaded with a film.
Using different kinds of films depending of the need for black and white or colour. Depending of the available light needing films of different sensibility.
And depending of what was preferred needing films for slides or negatives.
After shooting these films, often it was needed to keep them at a low temperature, they had to be developed.

Most photographers had a darkroom and were trained in developing films.
In the same darkroom prints could later be made of the negatives: the result of the developed films.
Making beautiful prints in the darkroom was a skill a photographer had to master.
Standing in a dark room in feeble yellow light in the smoke of the chemical liquids needed to develop and fix the prints.

In those days also an archive was needed.
Every film had to be stored in a special sheet and numbered.
Every sheet in a numbered book.
And an overall book describing all the data of every film.

It was a complex procedure needing professionalism of the highest level.
But it was the only way and many were able to be successful.

All this has fortunately disappeared by the introduction of digital photography.
No more films needed.
No more darkrooms needed.
No more libraries for archives needed.

In a way operating as a photographer has been simplified thanks to digital photography.
To the benefit also of the environment.
No more silver needed and no more dumping of chemicals in nature.

The only thing has been that a photographer had to start all over again.
To learn how to work with digital photography.
How to use exactly in a professional way a sophisticated digital camera.
How to work with software programs like Bridge and Photoshop on the computer.
And how to organise a reliable archive of digital images.

One of the results of the digital revolution in photography is that eventually lesser pictures will remain from the time we live in now.

It used to be that a photographer would shoot on film.
This film would be kept in the archive no matter what.
Because on that film of 36 images, maybe one could possibly have artistic or commercial value.

Nowadays a photographer downloads the images from his digital camera into his or her computer.
And selects which images possibly have commercial or artistic value to dump all the others in the digital garbage bin.

Historians have been looking at film archives of photographers from the past and discovered important images that never had been printed.
This phenomenon cannot happen again.
In the future only those images will be seen that are selected now as being important.

Does that matter?
Maybe it does.
A solution would be that every photographer has the option to not dump his excess images in his or her garbage bin but the option to send them automatically to one central hard drive of enormous proportions.
Billions of images will get stored on that hard drive only for people in the future to study.

Until then the documentation of today’s reality is based only on our vision and selection criteria we are having now.
Scaring.
Because compared to 50 years from now, we are primitive and barbaric.






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