The importance of photobooks

At the turn of the 21st century, if you had asked most adults what possessions would rescue from a fire, one imagines that photobooks would have been in the top three, easy. Today that answer might still hold true, but where once it would have been a safe bet, like Manchester United always finishing in the top two of the Premiership, it is no longer the case. Invariably, photobooks would be up there, along with personal keepsakes, but so too would a computer. That device has not only transformed humanity, but has become ingrained in the way human life is experienced and remembered.

These days pretty much everything is stored on a computer – addresses, work, poetry, art, music, film and photographs. In a thought-provoking piece in the New Review section of the Observer published earlier this month, John Naughton discussed how technology has impacted on the photographic medium. He mentioned that of the billions of photographs taken every year, most are left on cameras or archived in folders on computers or on social networking websites like Facebook. Do these pictures, technically, exist?

In a slightly non-linear way, Mr Naughton, focusing on a discussion of a website called Dear Photograph, lamented – or at least highlighted – how a picture is now kept in today’s digital world. On this website, people submit old photographs reshot in their original location, with that picture in the frame. Basically, the original picture is lined up in such a way that it looks like a complete picture.

"The images on the site are, of course, digital, but they could only have been created using old photographic prints. All of which means that it will be very difficult to do something like this in 30 years' time, " he writes.

Mr Naughton goes on to say that despite being told otherwise, no hard drive is permanent, quoting the renowned Magnum photographer Martin Parr, who said that humans are "in danger of having a whole generation that has no family albums, because people just leave them on their computer". And then someone presses delete and an entire history is eradicated so carelessly, so dangerously.

Of course, one might never delete these pictures, but even then, technology can’t guarantee their survival. An online archive is just as susceptible to the whims of technology as are the devices upon which they exist. Hardware, software and webpages can easily become obsolete. Indeed, in a generation, like betamax and HD DVD, they become relics, to all intents unusable.

A photobook however, is tangible, solid, durable even, and can be passed on from generation to generation safely. Unlike gadgets and gizmos, photobooks are unassailable against the advances in technology. So long as pictures are well kept, they can, like canvassed paintings from five centuries ago, last forever. The only real threat photobooks have are from the tyrants of history – like the destruction of Jewish books by the Nazis – or the vicissitudes of life.

But even then, photographs endure. Take the example of the 27,000 that have been salvaged after a tornado hit the Missouri city of Joplin earlier this year in May. Dirty, scratched and ripped in places, these images survived and when people began clearing up the debris and sifting through the rubble, these pictures shone like diamonds in the mud. They were not waste, but people’s cherished memories. A mangled computer, hard drive intact does not appeal to our human heart like a photograph.

There’s a moral in that story.