| | Great show indeed, and thanks again for pointing it out! I'd also seen most of the images before, many times, but there is nothing like seeing the original prints. Something about that brings one closer to the artist who made them. Their size, tints, contrasts, dynamic range, you name it. Nothing like the original.
More importantly, the show made me realize again and much more deeply, how much we're going to lose as a society, now that photographers are switching to digital. In the digital world, once an assignment is over and the choices for publication are made, the memory card is almost always erased and used again. In the olden days, once a negative was in existence, it was rarely discarded. The Clinton scandal, for example, would not have been the same event if the photo of him and Monica embracing didn't exist. But, the photographer thought not much of it at the time of shooting. Only remembered it months later, and had his assistant go through the discarded but filed images to find it. Bingo, history's changed.
Also, in the years past, newspapers often donated their old images to libraries. That's come to a screeching halt.
I think digital may be ushering in an era of visual memory loss that is unprecedented, and strikes me as monumentally tragic.
"All photographs are there to remind us of what we forget." -- John Berger |
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