A brave new world
The future is a brave new digital world. Whether we choose to adopt the new technologies, use AI, merge with the machine, we are already here and the future is near. When I consider art, photography, media production, etc. I believe there is infinite potential when we consider the future.
A thought I had yesterday about photography was the archive itself. When I googled Ray Metzker, who photographed Philadelphia, you can barely find any of his work online. This is a big problem for me as you can only find the work inside of these old books that are rare and hard to come by.
Just shoot digital…
If you photograph using film, I believe you should consider switching over to digital. If you really care about your work living on, we must embrace the new digital world. Most of the masters of photography have their work sort of sequestered or hidden and hard to come by when it comes to accessing their digital archives.
We should go beyond the gallery, the book, and the traditional ways of presenting work itself. The goal is to have the work accessible and to have it open source. That is the future of art and photography. There’s going to be a time when you have to go through the archive when you’re older and ready to die. Imagine that? What will we do in the future with our archives? Perhaps we have to find the new way or approach to preserve the work itself using the digital technology.
Simplify the process
Some solutions that are working for me currently have been switching to using the small JPEG high contrast black-and-white file on my Ricoh cameras. This allows me to have the smallest file size possible that is easy to access and requires zero processing. When you consider the work done on film, the amount of time having to spend in a dark room, with the labs scanning etc. it is absurd and just a really silly approach in this day and age.
We should go beyond the limits that the tradition has set out for us. We should find new solutions to archive work in this new digital world.