Preserving a Body of Work

Robert Goulet, 1965, queue the music — "To dream the impossible dream . . ."

Some things are simply not possible, or at least so close to impossible as to be indistinguishable from impossible. Preserving an entire body of work would be one of these.

I'm back from Houston FotoFest where lots of interesting discussions were had. I attended a lecture by Anne Tucker (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) and Ed Robinson (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), two of the most important curators in the country. One of the things that caught my attention during their talk was that major museums are not likely to want more than one or two pieces of work from a project. They simply don't have the room, resources, or funds to collect whole bodies of work. That got me to thinking: then who does?

I find there are few photographers these days not working with projects. Virtually every review I've done in the last dozen years has been a project. The days of the single "greatest hits" approach to photography is simply not being done by anyone that I've seen — not in ages. So, if everyone is working in projects of 10-200 images, how are these being preserved as a whole for future generations? How will we be able to see the project in its entirety?

This is not easy. Consider the alternatives …

Books are the kneejerk reaction, but books are usually produced in relatively small numbers; often considered "reproductions" of the artwork, not the artwork itself; very expensive to produce; problematic to market; often much smaller in scale than the original prints; require layout decisions that are often foreign to the original artwork (e.g., facing pages, gutter jumps); ink methods of reproduction often cannot match the full gamut of the original artwork. Books excel at preserving large numbers of images and their sequencing, but that is their primary virtue for preserving whole bodies of work.

PDFs and all the other digital media come to mind, but there is the looming question of long-term access both to the PDF file format and to the digital medium it is stored on. PDFs are inexpensive, preserve sequencing, can include other media components like audio and video, and are easy to reproduce. Great. They are also not the original medium, rely on an ever changing technology to be seen, present innumerable problems about reproducing color accurately, and require compatible hardware to use them. Short term viability is assured, but beyond a dozen years or so gets very dicey.

Collectors (those beneficent, well-heeled mystery class who are curiously difficult to locate in the flesh) might be the answer. But how many of them are there, how do you convince them that your project is worth preserving in its entirety? How will they preserve work for a larger audience? Do they collect whole projects, or only the investment-worthy 5-star images from a project? Hmmm …

There is your closet and the stack of Light Impressions boxes you keep there. Your project can live with complete integrity there, in the dark, all alone, with all your other projects as its only company. [Soft violins in the background.] Sort of like a benevolent jail. And then your heirs can figure out what to do with all that work after you take up residence in that great darkroom in the sky. [Sniffles and hankies. For the poor suffering artwork, that is.]

I can't help but think that the only answer is to not play the game. The entire concept of preservation is based on the assumption that someone in the future will care about our work. Perhaps. More likely not. Instead, why not put all our energy into finding an audience for our work today? If we can't interest folks in our work today, what makes us think folks a hundred years from now will care about it? From whence do we imagine all this fascination for our work will bubble up if we can even approach a gentle simmer of interest in the here and now?

Seems to me the best strategy for preserving our work is carpe diem. If we are lucky and deserving, perhaps our work will live in the imaginations of those we touch right now. As to future, in the memorable words of that noble philosopher Alfred E. Newman, What? Me Worry?

Comments

[Douglas R Winn]

Sheesh--this is timely and spot on. In real estate it is "location, location, location". In art, it is "audience, audience, audience".... In fact, maybe it is "relationship, relationship, relationship"....along with "work, work, work!"