Digital Cameras May Delete History

Aug. 11, 2004 -- Click. Click. Click-click.

We have seen the future, and it is measured in megapixels. By the end of this year, the Consumer Electronics Association predicts one-third of American households will have at least one digital camera. By 2007, it says, half of all households will.

"Film is definitely going away," says Christopher Chute, an analyst of the digital-imaging market for the research firm IDC. Film, he says, "is starting its long-term decline as more and more people all over the world pick up digital cameras."

Last year, for the first time, Americans bought more digital cameras than film. Kodak is closing nine film-processing laboratories this month; it has had to lay off tens of thousands of workers as it transforms itself into a digital-photography company.

As prices drop, people are scarfing up new digital cameras. Market research shows people especially like their small size (no longer limited by the need to squeeze a film cartridge inside) and the instant pictures one can see on the screen on the back of most cameras.

The cameras are convenient, stylish, and — this is crucial — virtually every model allows you to delete a picture on the spot if it did not come out the way you wanted.

The Times of Your Life

To historians, that delete function may not be a good thing. It has done more than change photography. It has changed the way we record our lives.

People share their favorite shots by e-mail instead of saving them in albums. They are no longer getting together to share their baby pictures; they are posting them on the Web.

Perhaps more significant is that Chute, the market analyst, reports 35 percent of digital photographers never print any of their pictures. Those who do are very selective about what they do print.

The net result: Only 13 percent of digital pictures taken ever end up on paper — the only way they can be seen without a computer or something else with a viewing screen.

History Deleted

No longer will people have shoe boxes full of pictures in the attic — the pictures that weren't quite good enough to make it into the family album. To Shannon Thomas Perich, a specialist in photographic history at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History, that is not necessarily a good thing.

"You don't have the boxes of rejects that you did before," she says, "and oftentimes the boxes of rejects are a whole lot more fun than the formalized conceptual images that appeared in the albums." They may, she says, tell us more about ourselves as well.

In a freezer at the museum, Perich has the donated negatives of famed photographer Richard Avedon, who shot many of the most celebrated faces of the 20th century. Even he might have been tempted to overuse the delete button.

Perich looks at a contact sheet of dozens of pictures he took of Jacqueline Kennedy shortly after her husband was elected president. His best exposure of her in a white evening gown was published in Harper's Bazaar; another frame, when they were interrupted by young Caroline, might have been lost if Avedon had been less conscientious.

"Take an image like this," says Perich, handing a visitor a snapshot, taken in 1959, of an African-American youngster from Philadelphia, making a goofy grin as he poses for the camera.

"Obviously, that's not a great shot. But maybe that's the way he really was. Today, you just know that picture would have been deleted.

"The thing that gets lost in digital photography," says Perich, "is that we have the front half, which is the reminder of that memory … but we don't have the whole story that goes with it."