2015 ~ The Year in Review - an old sorry tale but more true than ever

2105 year in review book covers ~ Au Sable Forks, NY - in the Adirondack PARK • click to embiggen

Long ago a picture must have been an event. Capturing a living image has become too ordinary a miracle, perhaps. They go about their automatic-drive Nikons and OM-2's and their Leicaflexes, and put their finger on the button, and the hand-held machinery makes a noise like a big toy cricket. Reep, reep, reep, reep. A billon billion slides, projected once, labeled, and filed forever. Windrows of empty yellow boxes blow across the Gobi., the Peruvian highlands, the temple steps at Chichicasenango. The clicking and whirring and clacking is the background sound at the Acropolis, at the beach at Cannes, on the slopes at Villefranche. All the bright people, stopped in the midst of life, looking with forced smile into the lenses, then to be filed away, their colors fading as the years pass, caught there in slide trays, stack loads, view cubes, until one day the camera person dies and the grandchild says, "Mom, I don't know any of these people. Or where these we're even taken. There are jillions of them in this big box and more in the closet. What will I do with them anyway?"

"Throw them out, dear."

• thoughts in the head of the fictitious character Travis McGee

This excerpt from the John MacDonald book, The Empty Cooper Sea (published in 1978), is a very prescient sentiment about the current picture making world. Substitute a few digital era words for the antiquated analog era words - while there most certainly are still Nikons, OMs and Leicas, the modern day reality regarding slide trays (et al) and the big storage box is the computer. With that word substitution, the passage could have been written last week.

While reading the aforementioned MacDonald book, this passage spoke to me and smacked me upside the head. Especially so inasmuch as I have been working on putting together my 2016 ~ The Year in Review book. A book with 50+ picture pages - one picture per page - with all manner of pictured referents, as opposed to a single themed body of work. An coincidentally, the wife and I had a recent conversation instigated by her question to me,"What's going to happen to your pictures after you die?"

It was and is very good question and one for which I do not have a completely adequate answer.

That written, I do have 16 POD books consisting of books which illustrate different bodies of work. Approximately 700 of 7,100+/- of my pictures are presented in those books. There are most likely 300-400 pictures yet to mined from my "finished" library and placed in other POD books.

So, as long as I live for another month or so - as far as I know my life is not threatened in any manner - I should have approximately 1/7 of my pictures in print form of one kind or and other. That number of pictures would be more than adequate to create a reasonable legacy / example of my work.

Of course, the "boxes", aka: external hard drives - one primary, one backup, in which all of work is stored would be left behind albeit not in a closet (I hope).

How about you? Are you doing anything about preserving your pictures? Do you even care?

PS - even though my visit numbers and page views here on the Landscapist are holding at a satisfactory level, comments are way down. This blog use to be a pretty lively place, comment wise. Comments which addressed not my pictures but rather thoughts and ideas a bout the medium of photography and its apparatus. It's starting to become a bit on the boring side for me.

Comments

[Julian]

What if you did photography without any reference to your legacy at all? Personally, I find that trying to create something for when I'm gone is too great a weight for me.

I enjoy your thoughtful blog- thanks!