This is the best way to hang for the memories? The text of this dear photo frame reads: ' I fell in love with a woman. I am not ready to let go … but she is '. Photo: dearphotograph.com' Speechless. Tears. Read this, "said a Tweet in my Twitterstream. "This" proved to be a website called Dear photograph. It encourages people to post pictures, incorporating photographs from their earlier taken at locations featured in the original image, as much as people keep postcard Eiffel Tower, so the map is hidden the actual view of the tower. It is a remarkably simple but powerful idea, and it actually attracts some of the responses that have been mentioned in the Tweet, which brought me to the site. Here is a photograph of a smiling child. Behind her is a FIR branches, man in a baseball cap, with his rest on her arms. "Dear photograph," the caption reads, "Dad is gone … but the strength of his arms will always be around us." It has signed "Holly".
Here is another. It shows a couple sitting on a bench in a tree. A have an arm around the other. The caption reads: "I fell in love with a woman. I am not ready to let go … but she is. "
A third picture shows a wrinkled snapshot of a woman, dressed in a 1940s clothes, walking along a street. "Dear photograph," it reads, "if I could turn the corner in 1942 and walk right in my mother, I would ask her, ' can I go you one more time? ' Love, your daughter. "
Another shows two children dressed in clown outfits. "We were inseparable in 26 years," says the caption, "the cancer came her way. Can you please give me my sister back? "
Not all photos are about the loss of a beloved. There is a picture of a young girl with a hula-hoop. "I wish I could still hula-hoop like I used to," says the caption.
Dear photo is a remarkable demonstration of regular, humdrum photos power to induce memories. Who has ever found a shoebox of old prints in an attic to learn this. They yield up pictures of us when we were young, thin and innocent, of our parents with uforet, serene expression and unfurrowed, privacy facial holidays even had once visited places. Photographs freeze moments in time, remind us of who we were – and, implicitly, by whom we have been.
But dear photograph is also a stark reminder of how threatened this power photography of has been. There is firstly the brusque, matter-of-fact, advance terms and conditions of the site. "When you submit your materials," read, "you give dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise in our beauty in all media." Or, to align the renowned internet broken English meme, "all your memories are belong to us".
There is nothing new in it, of course. It is also true for billions of photos that are posted to Facebook, under the terms and conditions, which stipulates that "you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use the IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP license). This IP license ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it. "
Other depressing idea triggered by dear photography is that the site is only possible because of the relative duration analog photography. Images on the site is, of course, digital, but they could only have been created using old paper photos. All of which means that it will be very difficult to do so in 30 years.
The reason is that while digital technology has generally been very good for photography as a mass medium, it has also made the resulting imagery much more fragile and impermanent. Billions of photographs taken each year, the vast majority only as digital files on kameræts memory card or on hard drives, PCs and servers in the Internet "Cloud". In theory – in view of the right back-up regimes and long-term organisational arrangements – this means that in theory could endure for a long time. In practice, given the vulnerability of storage technology (all of the hard drives fails, finally), formats the tempo in which computing kit becomes obsolete and saving changes, and the fact that most people Facebook accounts will die with them, the likelihood is that most of these billions of photographs does not long survive them, who took them.
It is, therefore, Magnum photographer Martin Parr concluded his fantastic piece last year about How to take better vacation photos with a single piece of advice: print your pictures. "We are in danger," he wrote, "to have a generation who have no family album, because people just leave them on their computer, and then suddenly they will be deleted." He is right.
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