Lost Capa Negs Found - The Mexican Suitcase

Bill Pierce

Bill Pierce

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A few days ago someone started a wonderful thread on the discovery of the Capa negs and referred back to the NYT article. The thread moved from my site and then disappeared, but I thought it was a good thread. I'm reposting the message I added after the thread had been up awhile. It's from an email that Dennis Brack sent to Dirck Halstead who forwarded it to me. So, these are not my thoughts. I'm not even sure I agree. But they are the thoughts of an accomplished, intelligent photographer (and an old friend).

"Subject: Re: Cache of Capa negs found after 70 years...

I love the photo that accompanies the article--that paper box with the
grid listing the contents of each role. Not to be a Luddite, but you
have to love that low-tech aspect. The negatives and the box have
their own jewel-like quality outside of the actual pictures they
contain. And now I should read the article . . .

Its a valid point about the "stability" of digital images, and for
digital information in general. How will today's info be retrieved
when nobody uses hard drives or flash drives? A big concern for the
likes of Citibank etc. One of the only solutions is to continually
upgrade your gear or risk losing your work. Ah yes, the continual
upgrade--buy more or perish. Corporate America's dream come true has
invaded photography, vis a vis the planned obsolescence invented by
the auto industry.

Yes, I'm about to rant, the only time you will hear me argue against
digital photography, because, even though I use film, I like digital
and think they both have their purpose.

HOWEVER, once you "go digital" (whatever that means) you are caught in
an endless need to keep buying expensive stuff. For example, with
film, when film technology improves you go out an buy a new 4 dollar
roll of film and hold on to your current camera and get better images.
You an do this for many many years. With digital, when sensors
improve and megapixels get bigger you get shafted and have to drop
another 800 bucks to get better images, while last year's 800 bucks
becomes a paper weight. The same logic applies to scanners, printers
and, unfortunately, computers and their storage media because even if
it is not about upgrading to keep abreast of quality, you simply have
to upgrade in order for things to work because this years camera and
scanner will not work with last year's operating system etc. etc. etc.
etc. Of course, Canon, Nikon et al could just make cameras where you
replace the sensor, like film, but where's the money in that?

My M4-2 was made in the 70's. If, forty years from now, you can go to
a flee market and buy a digital camera made in 2008 and actually
connect it to something and print pics I will, of course, eat these
words."
 
I'm with Dennis. I don't have to shoot digital (I don't shoot photos for a living), and a big reason I haven't started is the issue of archiving stuff and being able to retrieve it at a later time. I've used word-processing software since the late 1970's, and trying to open some of the older files (even if they're on media that can still be read) is a real pain and often can't be done. I don't want to go through the same drill with my pictures. Constantly renewing hardware is another consideration, although those costs are dropping---the Thinkpad I just bought for work was half the price of the 5-year-old Toshiba ultraportable it replaced, and is a big improvement in performance and features.

The New York Times ran a piece just before Christmas on the high costs that Hollywood studios are looking at for archiving digital copies of movies; you can read it here http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/21/business/STEAL.php if you don't want to register at the Times site. Scale down those costs to those of a stills archive, and there's still a big disparity between digital and film.
 
Since the dawn of Digital I have been questioning the manufacturers about this subject. They are not very interested in anwering truthfully! In the 80's I asked one of the biggest makers of CD's "What is the realistic lifespan of a CD". They hummed and hawed for a while and said " If it is a "laser" burned CD -10 years and if it is a CD using the cyanotype coating for storage - 5 years!". Of course, they all say that you should upgrade as new media becomes available. One experiment you can try is to make a sleeve of alu-foil, covering 1/2 the diameter of the CD and leave it on your desk for a couple of weeks and then try to retrieve the material! I haven't tried it with DVD's yet, but 2-3 week will scramble a regular CD.
The Capa negs are 60+years old and even though they have been stored in less than perfect conditions (non acid proof box) and rolled up, they can be straightened out and printed with conventional enlargers (or even scanned digitally). The Nitrite base is fragile but it can be transfered to other material.
What I fear is the loss of a generation of pictures. I am not taking about the pro's picture libraries as they are usually well kept and organized, but all the family shots, the "snap-shots" that shows an era through the eye of the amateur.
In the next LHSA Viewfinder there is a story, by a friend of ours, who had emigrated to the US in 1963. His english was minimal at the time and wandering around DC one sunday, he comes upon a mass of people at the Lincoln Memorial. He did recognize some faces, including Dr Martin Luther King, but the pretty lady who shared her sandwich with him, he did not figure until later that it was Joan Baez. These are 45 year old slides and once scanned they printed very well! There are 1000's of shots from the Freedom March of 63, but these are shot by someone who had no preconcieved concept of what was going on and the "innocence" of the viewpoint gives a different sense.
With the generational development of digital - 45 years would have meant re-formatting at least 10-12 times over that time - and how many of us would do that with our personal pictures? Also, if you go to Flicke and tag "Leica8" you will see a series of pictures taken in Italy in 1944-45. They are exceptional, not only for the timeframe, but also for the quality of the images! Again, stored in a box somewhere and retrieved in 2007, they show us life in Naples in 1945 as well as military life in the US Air Force at that time.
I can only hope that the pressure from the consumer ultimately will dictate to the manufacturers that "longevity" of the media is critical and failure to respond could be disastrous to them. Law-suits for lost wedding pictures, vacation shots, family pictures etc. I hate frivolous law-suits (spilled coffee at Mc Donalds etc) but this could the an instance when I support it!
 
I inherited a suitcase from my late grandmother full of photos and negs shot by my grandfather (most of them , that is). But even my dad knows only a handful of the people in the photos. Yes, it's fun to see my dad in the 50's (when he wasn't even of high school age) but I'm wondering about the "added value". How truly important are these photos to the future, to me, to my child? Mankind has survived for millennia without a record of its ancestors, and is none the worst for it. And even in our modern day there are millions upon millions of people who don't have a "permanent" record of their ancestors. Are they worse off then we are, who have? I'm really struggling with this as I don't see how a "permanent" record of our ancestors is important in any way.
 
sitemistic said:
No flame war here. I have no interest in my photographs surviving me, so I don't have a dog in this hunt.
Click to expand...

Sitemistic, if you don't have any interest in other people seeing your photographs (i.e. surviving you), I'm curious why you bother to take photographs, other than for your job? Just seeing something interesting would be enough and there would be no need to put in on paper. I've liked seeing some of your photographs, and others might too in the future.
I've started a project on S.F. Bay and came across some family photos from the 1920s. I saw a researcher's eyes pop out of his sockets when he saw a couple of them, since photos of that type of vessel are pretty much gone. He studies the historic vessels used on the bay and how they are made. It made an impression on me about how valuable photographs could become to people, whether family or somebody else. Some photos of my parents and grandparents have given us great pleasure to see, often at their expense! It's information about the times, if nothing else. If no one remembered bell bottoms and silk shirts from photographs or other media, they might come back.......
 
I'm always confused by these kinds of arguments. I mean - it isn't as if you can 'just' pick up a glass plate and print pictures from it. You need a suitably equipped dark room, which one could argue is old fashioned equipment. Or what about looking at a reel of 8 mm film? Unless you have the right projector, it's going to be hard. Not impossible, but hard.

To some extent I think that applies to digital. It is still possible to read floppy disks. You may need to look for a computer with a disk drive, but you can. I think there will always be enough old equipment around to read these things (probably on a skip in China, since that's where the rich West sends their stuff in). Of course, if things physically decline, that is the end of that. But that applies to negatives as well.

Lastly - I am a film convert. I have no digital camera (well, that I use, anyway) and have no interest in going the digital route. It's just that I am not entirely convinced that digital is necessarily that much more ephemeral than good ol' silver halide.

Doctor Zero
 
sitemistic said:
Within 10 years of my death, there will have been billions and billions of other photos taken and who will care about mine?
Click to expand...

I hadn't thought about the sheer number of photos now taken, and I do understand the value and pleasure of seeing things and going through the process. I guess part of why family photos have such value to me is that we have few of them, while that might not be the case in the future. Who want's to see, much less have archived, 900 photos of your cat?

sitemistic said:
The future has no time for the past.
Click to expand...

Without the past though, we wouldn't have anything to describe as better than now.🙂
 
Perhaps a brief summary of digital archiving for still images...

Currently, most folks use hard discs rather than CDs or DVDs. They fail rather than degrade.

Everything is duplicated. 2 hard discs next to the computer and one hard disc in another physical location. Then when one office hard disc fails, you take the information on the remaining one and transfer it to a new disc. When your office burns down, you go to the remote location and hope it hasn't burned down, too.

When a raw image is turned into a tiff or a jpg, you put it on the disc. When you make a duplicate when you are about to do some fancy Photoshopping, it goes on the disc. Everything goes on the disc and you hope most of the formats survive. Anyone who has tried to print a negative made for the platinum process or printing out paper on current silver enlarging papers knows that lack of compatability is not just a digital problem.

You pray to the god of your choice.

So far this seems to have worked fairly well. I haven't lost anything yet and most photojournalists had to involve themselves with digital fairly early. But three individual hard discs very quickly get replaced by a lot of expensive RAID arrays, and that isn't cheap.
 
Does history have no value?

Mankind survived for millennia without many good things, like the wheel, writing, & indoor plumbing, but we weren't necessarily better off for lacking those things. I believe records, including photos, are important because history is important & you can get a better picture, pardon the pun, of the past when you have more material to work with. And while you may not see much value in photos of your grandparents or parents, your children might.

RML said:
I inherited a suitcase from my late grandmother full of photos and negs shot by my grandfather (most of them , that is). But even my dad knows only a handful of the people in the photos. Yes, it's fun to see my dad in the 50's (when he wasn't even of high school age) but I'm wondering about the "added value". How truly important are these photos to the future, to me, to my child? Mankind has survived for millennia without a record of its ancestors, and is none the worst for it. And even in our modern day there are millions upon millions of people who don't have a "permanent" record of their ancestors. Are they worse off then we are, who have? I'm really struggling with this as I don't see how a "permanent" record of our ancestors is important in any way.
Click to expand...
 
This discovery is the photography equivalent of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If there is a God, she is giving us a sign and conserving the film medium. 😀

I was studying computer science at university when Window95 came out. A good number of professors took this opportunity to make us aware of the constant upkeep when it comes to dealing with changes in computer technologies. One of the things I had to do was code new compilers. Compilers are programs that translate computer code written in a readable computer language (like Pascal, C, Java, etc.) to a digital machine-level form that can be understood and executed by a computer. Because of the big change with Win95, some older compilers for a few obscure languages wouldn't work anymore. Man, what a drag that was! Coding compilers was the most boring thing imaginable. I remember thinking then how wasteful this sort of upkeep was. I found it amazing and frightening that a change in a popular operating system could have so many repercussions. So many things, all of a sudden, didn't work anymore.

There are other digitized things besides photographs and movies that are worth preserving. Wouldn't it be great if our children and grandchildren could visit a museum and play the original Pac Man game or fiddle around in VisiCalc, the world's first spreadsheet program. These historically valuable computer programs may perish someday. Even NASA can't read the digital data it compiled in early space flights anymore.

The best thing to do is to make people aware of this digital storage problem. The second best thing is to make copies like there is no tomorrow. Fortunately, computers are great copying machines - copying is on the most fundamental things that computers must do. When it comes to copying, digital medium has a clear advantage over analogue. I feel the chances of a digital file surviving depends mainly on how many copies are made throughout the years.
 
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Today my daughter asked me to reprint an digital image I took of her daughter in 2000. I found the CD and put it in the computer. The response was that the disc was damaged and could not be open. No image-no record. Two days ago I put a twenty year old scanned from film image on my blog. No problems. the negative was as good as the day it way processed.
fotorr
 
Strange that such a thread arises just as I began scanning and viewing my great grandfather's kodachrome, anscochrome and ektachromes from over 50 years ago. Nobody in my family cared about them and they were stored away in a closet. It made me realize that I want some relative of mine to find mine, absolutely.

I can't think of a good way of backing up digital images short of continually copying them to new equipment over the years. If I saved them on a HDD, threw it in a closet, in 50 years nothing will be able to read an SATA drive! "USB2.0? Nobody's used that in 40 years!" is what they'll say. brilliant.

I'll have to stick to b&w or koda if I want anything to stay fresh.

Oh, and I saw the website of the WWII photos from his father, really beautiful photos. I hope my tri-x looks that good someday.
 
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I'm not real interested in what happens to my own personal photos after I'm gone. I do worry about lost history, in that other people's photographs will not be available to future generations--lost in a digital meltdown somewhere. The loss of simplicity in storing images seems to me to work against there being anything like a Eugene Atget equivalent in the year 2108.

I bought my first computer in 1999. I'm on my third computer. The previous two crashed and burned with everything in them lost. Because of that, I have exactly zero faith in any type of electronic storage of important information. And while I don't think any of my photos would be of any interest to anyone a hundred years from now, I don't shoot anything digitally that I don't consider to be disposable.
 
I am going to come down on Tom A.'s side of the argument on this one, I have friends and colleagues wondering why I don't shoot digital and the main reason is I want my pictures to outlast me. I don't think the Camera, Computer and accessory companies want to answer this question because you just know there will be a huge collective scream from soccer mom's everywhere when they realize their kids photos are on an old hard drive in a landfill somewhere.

I don't think the archiving issue has been solved by a long shot and I highly doubt an external harddrive full of TIFFs are going to be compatable with the computer technology 10, 20 or 50 years from now. There is a price to be paid for convience and it's going to get ugly. Especially for future historians trying to figure out what happend in the early 21st Century.
 
furcafe said:
I believe records, including photos, are important because history is important & you can get a better picture, pardon the pun, of the past when you have more material to work with. And while you may not see much value in photos of your grandparents or parents, your children might.
Click to expand...

When my Dad's parents died he inherited some picture albums. They were pictures of people in their finest having a professional portrait done. There are rubber stamped photographers name and addresses (Edinburgh or Glasgow) on the backs. These were photos from the 1880's to early 1900's. They were the people who came over, family and friends who did not make the trip and people who died very young. Some you can see are family by the resemblance, my Dad recognized some, but most of them... we have no idea who they are.
The pictures survived (pretty well) but the story is lost.

Steve
 
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