The photographs in this exhibition are from my personal collection and were taken between 35-45 years ago. The negatives were recently digitized and the resulting image files are now conveniently available for online display. Despite the immaturity of the photographer, the photographs are apparently of some interest simply because they are views onto the past, something we collectively seem to find fascinating. This collective fascination with old photographs has engaged at least one dramatist and several semiotics theorists.

In Stephen Poliakov's "Shooting the Past" [1], we are invited to think about photographs as pieces of our personal histories, each telling part of our story: our collections of old photographs are now starting to tell the story of humankind in the same way.

Olivia Lahs-Gonzales [2] provides a summary of the position from semiotics: Photographs capture moments in time and play them back for us through our own experiences, memories and transactions. They are, as the French theorist Roland Barthes describes them, a superimposition "of reality and of the past". When looking at photographs of the long-dead or places that we have never visited, we are caught in a moment that is not quite now and not quite then. We see through the eyes of the photographer a past that is brought into the present.

More formally, Vivian Sobchack [3] writes that "the photograph's fascination is that it is a figure of transcendental time made available against the ground of a lived and finite temporality". According to Philippe Dubois [4] "the photograph is an index, more specifically, a trace left behind by the referent itself". As an index, the photograph is able to transcend the parameters of time and space which constrain the referent. To paraphrase Goran Sonesson [5], the photograph stands for a referent which has vanished from the scene, the photographic signifier is omnitemporal and omnispatial, tokens of its type being able to be instantiated at any time and place.

One of the observations to be made in this exhibition is that the material realisation of the photographic signifier is affected by entropy: photographs degrade, be they prints or negatives. They may degrade more slowly than their referents but they still degrade, their temporal transcendence is limited --- and when we're all wielding holographic cameras, two-dimensional indexes will probably seem just as quaint and dated as the scene they depict.

Digitization may appear to provide a solution but it is a limited one, there are unanswered questions surrounding the longevity of digitized images. The principles of entropy demand that if a material structure is to persist, then entropic decay must be countered by the injection of energy --- which, for digital image files, would involve periodic copying and validation. Digital images can only survive within the framework of an active preservation programme and, as a population, may yet prove to degrade faster and more catastrophically than their relatively undemanding analogue counterparts.

My own recollection has also degraded along with the negatives, I only have vague memories of the original referents of some of the photographs. I used the internet to check my memory of the location and made some unexpected discoveries about the referents which have given many of the images a new meaning. From a personal standpoint at least, these discoveries have transformed some old personal travel snapshots into a set of traces marking the degree of cultural and socio-economic change which has taken place since the photographs were taken.

Welcome to Image Degradation, our first online exhibition. We hope you find it of some interest.

References

1. Shooting the Past, Stephen Poliakov, 1999 DVD web page
2. Olivia Lahs-Gonzales, Curator's Statement, Accidental Mysteries web page
3. Vivian Sobchack, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 59.
4. Dubois, Philippe, L'acte photographique. Paris & Bruxelles: Nathan/Labor 1983.
5. Goran Sonesson, Pictorial Semiotics. web page