All the Photos Ever Taken (attn Marya)

An interesting read.

In the midst of the 3.5 trillion photos that have ever been taken it's easy to forget that the shoebox or album of old photos we have at home is incredibly fragile and special. Every 2 minutes today we snap as many photos as the whole of humanity took in the 1800s. In fact, ten percent of all the photos we have were taken in the past 12 months. And yet, there are still more physical photos hidden in our shoeboxes, hanging on our walls or lost in an album than there are digital photos littering our hard drive. These precious photos of the past 200 years tell us who we are and where we come from. So grab hold of that photo of you as a kid or of your grandparents' wedding and realize just how special it is.

When mom was dying and I started visiting again there were only two things I wanted, one impossible. The other was possession of a wicker suitcase from my childhood, repository of the family snapshots. It loomed quite large in my memory but when unearthed from the garage was more brief than suitcase. The photos inside were just as I remembered them.

The physical is enduring and valuable.

Among her other pictures I found some strange Kodak labeled CDs.
What's on them? Who knows!
The computer has no idea what to do with them.
I'm sure I could poke around and find some way to get at them- they're probably ten years old, a format obsolete and abandoned but not yet utterly forgotten. But compare to the 40+ year old family photos in the wicker briefcase, which anyone can handle and view. The Brownie camera that took most of them no longer exists, the negatives are long gone but the photos remain. Even more obsolete, I found the stacks and stacks of slide carousels, the fruit of mom's dad's photography kick. Ideally you'd load them in a projector, but they also work just fine as tiny photographs.

Compare with digital media, which is all written in specialized code.
Fragile, easily forgotten, corruptible.
I like actual photographs for the same reason I like actual books and actual record albums- analog is resistant and resilient.