THE CASE FOR HARD COPIES

THE MOST DOCUMENTED TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY WITHOUT ANY DURABLE RECORD.

We are in the most documented era of human history, yet we may be creating the least durable record of our existence.

Millions of photos are taken every day in phones around the world. Concerts, elections, riots, disasters and all manner of food on our tables.

I know that I have many photos lost to the digital archives- failed hard drives, failed iMacs, lost cloud accounts.

In 2023 I started printing photos. Sure I started with work that I was considering as ‘photography’, and then I commenced with the mass production of the ephemera of a time. Snaps, some mistake shots. The stuff you find in an album a few decades later.

I also think about how paranoia has stripped us of a human record. We lost all the photos of picking up people at the airport gate- or anywhere in the airport for that matter.

We are all guilty of watching life through a 6 inch screen, recording shows we will never watch. But someday that cloud account will die, or the drive connection will become obsolete. Whoosh.

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