A very long thread, in every sense.
Many years ago I had an article published in a local photographic journal, ostensibly as a rebuttal against an earlier article, but in essense, examining the nature of the medium called photography. Several of the issues it raised have been mentioned by my fellow correspondents already, but a very important one still remained unexplored. To put it in one sentence:
The mainstream practice of digital photography is actively destroying the collective visual memory of the presence at the expense of the future.
For instance, get out your negative files, and look at the negatives taken perhaps decades ago, rolls and rolls of them. Look at them closely and you would realise that what you have printed consist of but a small fraction of them. Those "dormant" images locked in the other unprinted negatives might not have been deemed "important" or "significant" enough to warrant the expense of printing, but as time progressed, they might reveal things which can indeed be seen as important. Perhaps a building which just happened to be in the background no longer exists, perhaps a person off to one side is no longer with us, perhaps the picture is too banal to be seen as worth the cost of a sheet of paper.
But they are still there, in a form that can be retrieved easily.
At the archives of, say, newspapers or news magazines, you can still go through the contact prints taken by the photographers back them, and by examining the "dormant" negatives, you hold the key to understanding how the events happened leading to the genesis of the photograph printed on the page, and also how the photographer worked towards achieving it.
In your family album there are many pictures which were not considered "good enough" to be enlarged or shared, but they still documented life in the raw.
These are the images, the raw materials, each of them add a piece of the jigsaw puzzle which become the visual memory, and the material for future historians.
What actually happened to these "dormant" images if we all shoot on digital? One click of the button, gone; because they're not "good enough", not "important" or "significant" enough for the here and now.
Having been a photographer, photojournalist and photographic historian for quite some time, I can very well see the anguish and frustration of historians say a century or two in the future; the dearth of raw materials will indeed make it hard for them, and the surviving images, the "unadulterated", "uncensored" images would be even rarer; our descendents' visual memory of the early 21st century (and beyond) will indeed be suffering from tunnel-vision: the vision of the minority of photographers who used film.
