nikola
Well-known
Thanks Tom and Nando! Great.
Chuck Albertson
Well-known
Tuolumne said:
This is not a flame war--I've seen plenty, and they're not a pretty sight. This is a reasoned discussion about the need to store and retrieve images, and folks have legitimate differences about the need to do so with theirs , nothing more. If some people aren't that concerned about the longevity of their images, so be it, that's their business.
Could say more, but I'm in the midst of a severe windstorm in southern Ireland and about to lose power, so I'll let it go at that.
Steve Litt
Well-known
Thanks for the link Tom well worth bookmarking.In regards to the Capa Lost Negative I see that on the Magnum site they are,in fact, not only Capa"s work but also negatives belonging to Gerda Taro and David Seymour.
Interesting!
Regards
Steve
Interesting!
Regards
Steve
jan normandale
Film is the other way
Interesting thread about everything but what Bill hoped to pass on. FWIW here's a link to the NY Times piece, also a video link to a CNN piece. I expect this digital material to disappear so I've made a copy for that eventuality. I'm assuming you're here because you're interested.
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/02/01/mexico.lost.suitcase.cnn
Art
The Capa Cache
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: January 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html?
TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.
The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.
Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.
And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.
“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.
The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.
Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.
But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)
Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.”
In a Warholian way that seems only to increase his contemporary allure, he also more or less invented himself. Born Endre Friedmann in Hungary, he and Taro, whom he met in Paris, cooked up the persona of Robert Capa — they billed him as “a famous American photographer” — to help them get assignments. He then proceeded to embody the fiction and make it true. (Taro, a German whose real name was Gerta Pohorylle, died in Spain in 1937 in a tank accident while taking pictures.)
Curators at the International Center of Photography, who have begun a months-long effort to conserve and catalog the newly discovered work, say the full story of how the negatives, some 3,500 of them, made their way to Mexico may never be known.
In 1995 Jerald R. Green, a professor at Queens College, part of the City University of New York, received a letter from a Mexico City filmmaker who had just seen an exhibition of Spanish Civil War photographs sponsored in part by the college. He wrote that he had recently come into possession of an archive of nitrate negatives that had been his aunt’s, inherited from her father, Gen. Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez, who died in 1967. The general had been stationed as a diplomat in the late 1930s in Marseille, where the Mexican government, a supporter of the Republican cause, had begun helping antifascist refugees from Spain immigrate to Mexico.
From what experts have been able to piece together from archives and the research of Mr. Whelan, the biographer (who died last year), Capa apparently asked his darkroom manager, a Hungarian friend and photographer named Imre Weisz, known as Cziki, to save his negatives in 1939 or 1940, when Capa was in New York and feared his work would be destroyed.
Mr. Weisz is believed to have taken the valises to Marseille, but was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. At some point the negatives ended up with General Aguilar Gonzalez, who carried them to Mexico, where he died in 1967. It is unclear whether the general knew who had taken the pictures or what they showed; but if he did, he appears never to have tried to contact Capa or Mr. Weisz, who coincidentally ended up living the rest of his life in Mexico City, where he married the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. (Mr. Weisz died recently, in his 90s; Mr. Whelan interviewed him for his 1985 biography of Capa but did not elicit any information about the lost negatives.)
“It does seem strange in retrospect that there weren’t more efforts to locate these things,” Mr. Wallis said. “But I think they just gave them up. They were lost in the war, like so many things.”
When the photography center learned that the work might exist, it contacted the Mexican filmmaker and requested their return. But letters and phone conversations ended with no commitments, said Phillip S. Block, the center’s deputy director for programs, who added that he and others were not even sure at the beginning if the filmmaker’s claims were true, because no one had been shown the negatives. (Saying that the return of the negatives was a collective decision of the Aguilar Gonzalez family, the filmmaker asked not to be identified in this article and declined to be interviewed for it.)
Meetings with the man were scheduled, but he would fail to appear. “And then communications broke off completely for who knows what reason,” Mr. Block said. Efforts were made from time to time, unsuccessfully, to re-establish contact. But when the center began to organize new shows of Capa and Taro’s war photography, which opened last September, it decided to try again, hoping that images from the early negatives could be incorporated into the shows.
“He was never seeking money,” Mr. Wallis said of the filmmaker. “He just seemed to really want to make sure that these went to the right place.”
Frustrated, the center enlisted the help of a curator and scholar, Trisha Ziff, who has lived in Mexico City for many years. After working for weeks simply to track down the reclusive man, she began what turned out to be almost a year of discussions about the negatives.
“It wasn’t that he couldn’t let go of this,” said Ms. Ziff, interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where she is completing a documentary about the widely reproduced image of Che Guevara based on a photograph by Alberto Korda.
“I think it was that no one before me had thought this through in the way that something this sensitive needs to be thought through,” she said. The filmmaker worried in part that people in Mexico might be critical of the negatives’ departure to the United States, regarding the images as part of their country’s deep historical connection to the Spanish Civil War. “One had to respect and honor the dilemma he was in,” she said.
In the end Ms. Ziff persuaded him to relinquish the work — “I suppose one could describe me as tenacious,” she said — while also securing a promise from the photography center to allow the filmmaker to use Capa images for a documentary he would like to make about the survival of the negatives, their journey to Mexico and his family’s role in saving them.
“I see him quite regularly,” Ms. Ziff said, “and I think he feels at peace about this now.”
In December, after two earlier good-faith deliveries of small numbers of negatives, the filmmaker finally handed Ms. Ziff the bulk of the work, and she carried it on a flight to New York herself.
“I wasn’t going to put it in a FedEx box,” she said.
“When I got these boxes it almost felt like they were vibrating in my hands,” she added. “That was the most amazing part for me.”
Mr. Wallis said that while conservation experts from the George Eastman House in Rochester are only now beginning to assess the condition of the film, it appears to be remarkably good for 70-year-old nitrate stock stored in what essentially looks like confectionery boxes.
“They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh. We’ve sort of gingerly peeked at some of them just to get a sense of what’s on each roll.”
And discoveries have already been made from the boxes — one red, one green and one beige — whose contents appear to have been carefully labeled in hand-drawn grids made by Mr. Weisz or another studio assistant. Researchers have come across pictures of Hemingway and of Federico García Lorca.
The negative for one of Chim’s most famous Spanish Civil War photographs, showing a woman cradling a baby at her breast as she gazes up toward the speaker at a mass outdoor meeting in 1936, has also been found. “We were astonished to see it,” Mr. Wallis said. (The photograph, often seen as showing the woman worriedly scanning the skies for bombers, was mentioned by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” her 2003 reconsideration of ideas from her well-known treatise “On Photography,” a critical examination of images of war and suffering.)
The research could bring about a reassessment of the obscure career of Taro, one of the first female war photographers, and could lead to the determination that some pictures attributed to Capa are actually by her. The two worked closely together and labeled some of their early work with joint credit lines, sometimes making it difficult to establish authorship conclusively, Mr. Wallis said. He added that there was even a remote possibility that “The Falling Soldier” could be by Taro and not Capa.
“That’s another theory that’s been floated,” he said. “We just don’t know. To me that’s what’s so exciting about this material. There are so many questions and so many questions not even yet posed that they may answer.”
Ultimately, Mr. Wallis said, the discovery is momentous because it is the raw material from the birth of modern war photography itself.
“Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,” he said. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines. And that visual revolution he embodied took place right here, in these early pictures.”
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/02/01/mexico.lost.suitcase.cnn
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/02/01/mexico.lost.suitcase.cnn
Art
The Capa Cache
By RANDY KENNEDY
Published: January 27, 2008
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/27/arts/design/27kenn.html?
TO the small group of photography experts aware of its existence, it was known simply as “the Mexican suitcase.” And in the pantheon of lost modern cultural treasures, it was surrounded by the same mythical aura as Hemingway’s early manuscripts, which vanished from a train station in 1922.
The suitcase — actually three flimsy cardboard valises — contained thousands of negatives of pictures that Robert Capa, one of the pioneers of modern war photography, took during the Spanish Civil War before he fled Europe for America in 1939, leaving behind the contents of his Paris darkroom.
Capa assumed that the work had been lost during the Nazi invasion, and he died in 1954 on assignment in Vietnam still thinking so. But in 1995 word began to spread that the negatives had somehow survived, after taking a journey worthy of a John le Carré novel: Paris to Marseille and then, in the hands of a Mexican general and diplomat who had served under Pancho Villa, to Mexico City.
And that is where they remained hidden for more than half a century until last month, when they made what will most likely be their final trip, to the International Center of Photography in Midtown Manhattan, founded by Robert Capa’s brother, Cornell. After years of quiet, fitful negotiations over what should be their proper home, legal title to the negatives was recently transferred to the Capa estate by descendants of the general, including a Mexican filmmaker who first saw them in the 1990s and soon realized the historical importance of what his family had.
“This really is the holy grail of Capa work,” said Brian Wallis, the center’s chief curator, who added that besides the Capa negatives, the cracked, dust-covered boxes had also been found to contain Spanish Civil War images by Gerda Taro, Robert Capa’s partner professionally and at one time personally, and by David Seymour, known as Chim, who went on to found the influential Magnum photo agency with Capa.
The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.
Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.
But the discovery is being hailed as a huge event for more than forensic reasons. This is the formative work of a photographer who, in a century defined by warfare, played a pivotal role in defining how war was seen, bringing its horrors nearer than ever — “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough” was his mantra — yet in the process rendering it more cinematic and unreal. (Capa, not surprisingly, later served a stint in Hollywood, befriending directors like Howard Hawks and romancing Ingrid Bergman.)
Capa practically invented the image of the globe-trotting war photographer, with a cigarette appended to the corner of his mouth and cameras slung over his fatigues. His fearlessness awed even his soldier subjects, and between battles he hung out with Hemingway and Steinbeck and usually drank too much, seeming to pull everything off with panache. William Saroyan wrote that he thought of Capa as “a poker player whose sideline was picture-taking.”
In a Warholian way that seems only to increase his contemporary allure, he also more or less invented himself. Born Endre Friedmann in Hungary, he and Taro, whom he met in Paris, cooked up the persona of Robert Capa — they billed him as “a famous American photographer” — to help them get assignments. He then proceeded to embody the fiction and make it true. (Taro, a German whose real name was Gerta Pohorylle, died in Spain in 1937 in a tank accident while taking pictures.)
Curators at the International Center of Photography, who have begun a months-long effort to conserve and catalog the newly discovered work, say the full story of how the negatives, some 3,500 of them, made their way to Mexico may never be known.
In 1995 Jerald R. Green, a professor at Queens College, part of the City University of New York, received a letter from a Mexico City filmmaker who had just seen an exhibition of Spanish Civil War photographs sponsored in part by the college. He wrote that he had recently come into possession of an archive of nitrate negatives that had been his aunt’s, inherited from her father, Gen. Francisco Aguilar Gonzalez, who died in 1967. The general had been stationed as a diplomat in the late 1930s in Marseille, where the Mexican government, a supporter of the Republican cause, had begun helping antifascist refugees from Spain immigrate to Mexico.
From what experts have been able to piece together from archives and the research of Mr. Whelan, the biographer (who died last year), Capa apparently asked his darkroom manager, a Hungarian friend and photographer named Imre Weisz, known as Cziki, to save his negatives in 1939 or 1940, when Capa was in New York and feared his work would be destroyed.
Mr. Weisz is believed to have taken the valises to Marseille, but was arrested and sent to an internment camp in Algiers. At some point the negatives ended up with General Aguilar Gonzalez, who carried them to Mexico, where he died in 1967. It is unclear whether the general knew who had taken the pictures or what they showed; but if he did, he appears never to have tried to contact Capa or Mr. Weisz, who coincidentally ended up living the rest of his life in Mexico City, where he married the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. (Mr. Weisz died recently, in his 90s; Mr. Whelan interviewed him for his 1985 biography of Capa but did not elicit any information about the lost negatives.)
“It does seem strange in retrospect that there weren’t more efforts to locate these things,” Mr. Wallis said. “But I think they just gave them up. They were lost in the war, like so many things.”
When the photography center learned that the work might exist, it contacted the Mexican filmmaker and requested their return. But letters and phone conversations ended with no commitments, said Phillip S. Block, the center’s deputy director for programs, who added that he and others were not even sure at the beginning if the filmmaker’s claims were true, because no one had been shown the negatives. (Saying that the return of the negatives was a collective decision of the Aguilar Gonzalez family, the filmmaker asked not to be identified in this article and declined to be interviewed for it.)
Meetings with the man were scheduled, but he would fail to appear. “And then communications broke off completely for who knows what reason,” Mr. Block said. Efforts were made from time to time, unsuccessfully, to re-establish contact. But when the center began to organize new shows of Capa and Taro’s war photography, which opened last September, it decided to try again, hoping that images from the early negatives could be incorporated into the shows.
“He was never seeking money,” Mr. Wallis said of the filmmaker. “He just seemed to really want to make sure that these went to the right place.”
Frustrated, the center enlisted the help of a curator and scholar, Trisha Ziff, who has lived in Mexico City for many years. After working for weeks simply to track down the reclusive man, she began what turned out to be almost a year of discussions about the negatives.
“It wasn’t that he couldn’t let go of this,” said Ms. Ziff, interviewed by phone from Los Angeles, where she is completing a documentary about the widely reproduced image of Che Guevara based on a photograph by Alberto Korda.
“I think it was that no one before me had thought this through in the way that something this sensitive needs to be thought through,” she said. The filmmaker worried in part that people in Mexico might be critical of the negatives’ departure to the United States, regarding the images as part of their country’s deep historical connection to the Spanish Civil War. “One had to respect and honor the dilemma he was in,” she said.
In the end Ms. Ziff persuaded him to relinquish the work — “I suppose one could describe me as tenacious,” she said — while also securing a promise from the photography center to allow the filmmaker to use Capa images for a documentary he would like to make about the survival of the negatives, their journey to Mexico and his family’s role in saving them.
“I see him quite regularly,” Ms. Ziff said, “and I think he feels at peace about this now.”
In December, after two earlier good-faith deliveries of small numbers of negatives, the filmmaker finally handed Ms. Ziff the bulk of the work, and she carried it on a flight to New York herself.
“I wasn’t going to put it in a FedEx box,” she said.
“When I got these boxes it almost felt like they were vibrating in my hands,” she added. “That was the most amazing part for me.”
Mr. Wallis said that while conservation experts from the George Eastman House in Rochester are only now beginning to assess the condition of the film, it appears to be remarkably good for 70-year-old nitrate stock stored in what essentially looks like confectionery boxes.
“They seem like they were made yesterday,” he said. “They’re not brittle at all. They’re very fresh. We’ve sort of gingerly peeked at some of them just to get a sense of what’s on each roll.”
And discoveries have already been made from the boxes — one red, one green and one beige — whose contents appear to have been carefully labeled in hand-drawn grids made by Mr. Weisz or another studio assistant. Researchers have come across pictures of Hemingway and of Federico García Lorca.
The negative for one of Chim’s most famous Spanish Civil War photographs, showing a woman cradling a baby at her breast as she gazes up toward the speaker at a mass outdoor meeting in 1936, has also been found. “We were astonished to see it,” Mr. Wallis said. (The photograph, often seen as showing the woman worriedly scanning the skies for bombers, was mentioned by Susan Sontag in “Regarding the Pain of Others,” her 2003 reconsideration of ideas from her well-known treatise “On Photography,” a critical examination of images of war and suffering.)
The research could bring about a reassessment of the obscure career of Taro, one of the first female war photographers, and could lead to the determination that some pictures attributed to Capa are actually by her. The two worked closely together and labeled some of their early work with joint credit lines, sometimes making it difficult to establish authorship conclusively, Mr. Wallis said. He added that there was even a remote possibility that “The Falling Soldier” could be by Taro and not Capa.
“That’s another theory that’s been floated,” he said. “We just don’t know. To me that’s what’s so exciting about this material. There are so many questions and so many questions not even yet posed that they may answer.”
Ultimately, Mr. Wallis said, the discovery is momentous because it is the raw material from the birth of modern war photography itself.
“Capa established a mode and the method of depicting war in these photographs, of the photographer not being an observer but being in the battle, and that became the standard that audiences and editors from then on demanded,” he said. “Anything else, and it looked like you were just sitting on the sidelines. And that visual revolution he embodied took place right here, in these early pictures.”
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2008/02/01/mexico.lost.suitcase.cnn
PlantedTao
Well-known
Tom A said:
good stuff...looking at those will keep me busy. I love film and everything about it...
especially after development, it's like I'm a kid again and it is Christmas morning. That has to be similar to the feeling of finding Capa's negs... the anticipation to see the image must of been immense. Digital has never provided that... too quick.
neelin
Established
http://www.zonezero.com/exposiciones/fotografos/ziff/
Okay, let's see how long it takes this "Mexican Suitcase" to disappear. Here is more storey & some of THE photos.
Robert
Nando
Well-known
That's wonderful Robert. Thanks for sharing the link.
Chuck Albertson
Well-known
According to the British Journal of Photography, the Barbican Art Gallery (Silk Street, City of London) will have some of the "Lost Capas" on exhibit from October 17 through January 25. However, the musuem says it has been informed by ICP that the "Mexican Suitcase" collection does not contain any additional photos from the "falling soldier" series--so the debate can rage on, for those so inclined.
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
http://www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery
Last edited:
photovdz
Well-known
May be Leica should make a special edition of a IIIa for that occasion with red and black curtains ;-) instead of selling humidors ;-)... by the way... don't say "falling soldier" but "falling milician" as He (the guy on the picture and may be Robert Capa too... ) would have felt insulted to be called soldier...
Being serious for a while, one of the bad point of digital archives (except their volatility in time) is that usually only the best pictures are kept... I still have the negs of my early pictures ('72) and I 'm in the process of scanning them... and I find today gems, things I didn't thought interesting at that time...
I know that today when I shoot digital i don't keep record of the misses, the trial and errors... and that I make 10 times more pictures for the same results.... (but for ease, my little samsung NV10 is always in my pocket, where my rollei 35 was before... nice camera but very ugly flash)
Being serious for a while, one of the bad point of digital archives (except their volatility in time) is that usually only the best pictures are kept... I still have the negs of my early pictures ('72) and I 'm in the process of scanning them... and I find today gems, things I didn't thought interesting at that time...
I know that today when I shoot digital i don't keep record of the misses, the trial and errors... and that I make 10 times more pictures for the same results.... (but for ease, my little samsung NV10 is always in my pocket, where my rollei 35 was before... nice camera but very ugly flash)
Bill Pierce
Well-known
Thanks for that detailed information. I think it's exceptionally useful.
My own system is somewhat similar. It ends up with 2 hard disc copies of each image or variation on it (the RAID system) and a back up hard disc copy at the in-laws in case my house burns down (your internet storage). I'm also in the process of making as many prints as possible (silver from old negatives, black and white pigment from materials with a good rating from Henry Wilhelm) because the "archival" prints will always be available, even if slightly faded, if the digital ever becomes unretrievable. Besides, most people are not interested in looking at a stack of hard discs.
Bill
My own system is somewhat similar. It ends up with 2 hard disc copies of each image or variation on it (the RAID system) and a back up hard disc copy at the in-laws in case my house burns down (your internet storage). I'm also in the process of making as many prints as possible (silver from old negatives, black and white pigment from materials with a good rating from Henry Wilhelm) because the "archival" prints will always be available, even if slightly faded, if the digital ever becomes unretrievable. Besides, most people are not interested in looking at a stack of hard discs.
Bill
Jim Evidon
Jim
While cleaning out some cupboards the other day, I ran across some long forgotten K64 slides from 1967 (42 years ago) of my kids while we were vacationing in Yosemite. I picked out two slides of my son; one in front of a very bokeh'd waterfall and the other sitting in a mossy bough of a large tree with the light coming down from the upper right mainly illuminating him at age 5 in a pensive mood. I scanned them and found the color still pretty good even though they had not been in archival storage and required only minor CS2 adjustment.
So, this is right on point with the arguments made by Bill Pierce regarding archiving your photos. If it had been digital, how many times over the years would I had to have recopied to CD, DVD, or even hard disc to have any sort of an image, assuming that technology would have been available since 1967? Point made.
BTW, I am a heavy user of digital but at age 75 and a busy amateur photographer, I am really no longer as concerned about extended archival life of images as I used to be. Nevertheless, I am getting back into film if only to extend my photographic scope and skills. But to the younger user and to the professional, there is really no contest between film and digital if archiving is a priority.
So, this is right on point with the arguments made by Bill Pierce regarding archiving your photos. If it had been digital, how many times over the years would I had to have recopied to CD, DVD, or even hard disc to have any sort of an image, assuming that technology would have been available since 1967? Point made.
BTW, I am a heavy user of digital but at age 75 and a busy amateur photographer, I am really no longer as concerned about extended archival life of images as I used to be. Nevertheless, I am getting back into film if only to extend my photographic scope and skills. But to the younger user and to the professional, there is really no contest between film and digital if archiving is a priority.
Last edited:
PMCC
Late adopter.
The Mexican Suitcase Method: a helluva a way to store and retrieve negatives, but whatever works.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/arts/design/30capa.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/29/arts/20090429_SUITCASE_SLIDESHOW_index.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/30/arts/design/30capa.html?hp
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/29/arts/20090429_SUITCASE_SLIDESHOW_index.html
GREAT NY Time Article
GREAT NY Time Article
Its a great article with great pics.
What works,works. I'm packing my Mexican Suitcase to be found in 50 years as you read this.
Stephen
GREAT NY Time Article
Its a great article with great pics.
What works,works. I'm packing my Mexican Suitcase to be found in 50 years as you read this.
Stephen
Bruin
Noktonian
A quick note on external hard drives...
When you're not using it, turn it OFF. You might have to cut the power to it somehow (get a switch between the adapter and outlet). All hard disks have a MTBF (mean time between failures) rating, meaning on average it will fail once in so many thousands of hours. For a drive that's running 24/7 that might be a few years. Just turn the thing off when you're not using it, and you'll extend it's usable life by A LOT.
Not a perfect solution, but it helps
When you're not using it, turn it OFF. You might have to cut the power to it somehow (get a switch between the adapter and outlet). All hard disks have a MTBF (mean time between failures) rating, meaning on average it will fail once in so many thousands of hours. For a drive that's running 24/7 that might be a few years. Just turn the thing off when you're not using it, and you'll extend it's usable life by A LOT.
Not a perfect solution, but it helps
amateriat
We're all light!
Kevin: A lot depends on your total computer setup. In my case, all my external drives, except one, spin down after a given period of inactivity; they're still powered-up, just not spinning. (The exception is my network drive, which is linked to three computers, and needs to be available 24/7 for backup and remote file access. This is somewhat old-school in enterprise environments, but rather new frontier in home systems such as mine.)
There's also the ongoing argument over whether computers and related components suffer greater wear and tear being repeatedly switched on and off or simply left on. From an energy cost and environmental standpoint, the former is preferred, but this still leaves a few questions unanswered.
Also, there are hard drives, and there are hard drives. There is such a thing as a heavier-duty, "server-class" drive that's built to a somewhat tougher standard than the 1TB numbers on sale at Staples for just a C-note. Of course, they cost somewhat more, but are likely quite worth it.
By contrast, that Mexican Suitcase looks pretty damn good, eh?
- Barrett
There's also the ongoing argument over whether computers and related components suffer greater wear and tear being repeatedly switched on and off or simply left on. From an energy cost and environmental standpoint, the former is preferred, but this still leaves a few questions unanswered.
Also, there are hard drives, and there are hard drives. There is such a thing as a heavier-duty, "server-class" drive that's built to a somewhat tougher standard than the 1TB numbers on sale at Staples for just a C-note. Of course, they cost somewhat more, but are likely quite worth it.
By contrast, that Mexican Suitcase looks pretty damn good, eh?
- Barrett
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maddoc
... likes film again.
Three years ago my external backup hard-disk died exactly from this, keeping it switched off except for the backup procedure. Once, while switching it on, it hiccuped and the partition table got corrupted... :bang: It took me some time, effort and money to recover the data (well, most of them ...)
The Mexican suitcase sounds better to me ...
The Mexican suitcase sounds better to me ...
peterm1
Veteran
There is an article in todays copy of the Melbourne Age about the suitcase and its contents for anyone in Oz or elsewhere who is interested in knowing more.
The link
http://www.theage.com.au/world/photo-find-gives-modern-edge-to-capas-images-20090430-aowk.html
The link
http://www.theage.com.au/world/photo-find-gives-modern-edge-to-capas-images-20090430-aowk.html
Harry Lime
Practitioner
I primarily shoot film, but every once and a while I'll head out with the devil's tool for some color work. When I shoot digital, I don't take a gazillion photos, but tend to shoot as I do with film.
My friends laugh at me, because I'll head out with 2 x 2GB cards (144 shots) and barely fill one... Anyone ever hear stories about when the old Speed Graphic guys were forced to switch over to Nikons or similar? They would come back from a shoot with like 2 or 4 shots on a roll. 'Here kid, print both of em'!'
Anyhow, my number of digital keepers is relatively low. I back up the full days shoot on a small RAID, but the real winners end up on slow and therefore cheap memory cards from a reputable maker. Every once and while SANDISK or a similar company will discontinue a particular card and blow them out at rock bottom prices. I'll grab a few gigs, which will hold me for a good while.
I figure I'll toss the cards and a card reader in a shoe box and see what happens... Once I accidentally put a SD card though the washing machine and dryer and it still worked. Try that with a hard disk...
Bill Pierce
Well-known
When Dirck Halstead first started as a teen ager with UPI, he was sent to Dallas to work under Charlie McCarty, a picture editor who is a legend in our racket. Anyway, one of Dirck's first calls was a fire. Anxious to do a good job, he exposed between 15 and 20 holders in his Speed Graphic, each with two sheets of film.
When he got back to the office, McCarty took the holders and methodically pulled the dark slide and exposed the film in the first holder, the second holder and, finally, all the holders but one. He turned to Dirck and said, "Develop this one."
By the way, if you want to hear one of the old shooters who, indeed, did shoot only one or two frames on a roll of film in his Nikon when he set his Speed Graphic down go to
http://www.eddieadamsworkshop.com/info/?c=audio
and listen to the selection by Louie Liotta of the Daily News.
(As to the storage of digital images, that's almost worth its own thread.)
RBruceCR
Well-known
Outstanding conversation and to me the future is in print! Print your pictures and they will last!