In Netflix’s 2017 “Kodachrome,” an ode to the end of Kodak’s film stock of the same name, fictional photojournalist Ben Ryder (Ed Harris) makes an apocryphal observation.
“People are taking more pictures now than ever before,” the character muses. “Billions of ‘em. But, there’s no slides, no prints. They’re just data, electronic dust. Years from now, when they dig us up, there won’t be any pictures to find. No record of who we were, how we lived.”
Ryder, inspired by Steve McCurry — the photographer of “Afghan Girl” — was, in some ways, a swan song to a philosophy of permanence, a time when a photograph was only one negative on a roll. If it was destroyed, the image was gone forever. Punctuating this point, almost as if he himself was a photograph, Ryder dies of cancer before seeing the developed images for which he undertook a painful odyssey.
Like many netizens since the 2010 launch of Instagram, coincidentally — or poetically — the same year Kodachrome was discontinued, I’ve spent most of my life experiencing photography on a six-inch screen. Appreciating a photo, which a professional photographer may have spent months creating, was as simple as a five-second glance accompanied by a like before swiping to the next post.
It wasn’t until January, when I visited Washington D.C, that I was exposed to the magic of seeing photography as, in some ways, it was originally intended: enlarged on a wall — a physical object. Taking respite from the frigid winds and piercing rain, I hunted the halls of the National Portrait Gallery for the exhibition I had come to see: an expansive array of Dorothea Lange’s famous portraits.
One of these portraits, “Migrant Mother,” was actually featured in a history class I took the previous year. Together, my class pored over the image, analyzing the expression on the woman’s face and the ethics of the photo itself as a historical document. Our discussion, though, was based on a digitized scan of the image; with a click of a button, we could close our browser window and the photo would disappear. In effect, “Migrant Mother” existed only as long as our attention spans allowed.
When I finally saw the physical print — created through an intensive process involving silver salts, gelatin and hours in a red-lit darkroom — I understood the power behind the image. Physically presented on a wall, I could see the lines of the mother’s forehead and the gentle imprint of her hand on the side of her cheek. I could blink or turn around — I could even run to Union Station and take the next train out of town — but “Migrant Mother” would remain on the wall, obstinate to my attention.
In the following months, I had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of physical prints while traveling. I visited The Art Institute of Chicago to see photographs of apartheid South Africa by David Goldblatt and went to Photo Museum Ireland to view a range of photos from The Troubles. After just a few brief visits, I’ve become enthralled with the magic of a physical photo in front of me and already plan to visit photography exhibitions in San Francisco, Detroit and Boston before the easing of the summer heat.
Yet, one place where I haven’t been able to experience this magic has been the University of Michigan Museum of Art, which — although it has a handful of photographs on display — does not currently have a dedicated photography exhibition. To learn more about this and the presence of photography in museums more broadly, I sat down with Jennifer Friess, associate curator of photography at the UMMA. During our conversation, she told me that UMMA was one of the first museums to acquire photography as part of its collection.
“One of the founding acquisitions … included two photographs from a professor that had made a donation,” Friess said. “So these two portrait photographs, it was unusual for photographs to be acquired by museums in the 1940s. Only a few museums had photography specific collections even then.”
Although Friess said the initial acquisition of these photographs was a fluke, and more photography wouldn’t be acquired until the 1970s, UMMA’s online collection features 296 pages of photographs from a wide range of artists including Jarod Lew, James Galbraith and André Kertész. These images, despite the size and variety in the collection, are mostly kept out of view, while other exhibitions — such as “We Write To You About Africa” — are displayed for months or even years.
“Photography is light-sensitive,” Friess said. “It’s made on paper, and so you can’t have photographs up on view as much as you can paintings and sculptures. So there’s a constant need to be rotating exhibitions, and whichever curator is focusing on that area is constantly churning out exhibitions.”
Friess’ point makes sense. Paging through “Seeing People”, a book of Dorothea Lange photos compiled by the National Portrait Gallery, one sees that many of the photos are in poor condition. Likely, they were scanned as prints rather than negatives — the original developed film roll which is, more than likely, long destroyed — and have nearly 100 years of aging and display. Still, I found myself disheartened by her answer. Yes, there may be logistical reasons why keeping these exhibitions on permanent display is difficult, but does the cost truly outweigh the benefit?
Photography has the potential to be more impactful than a traditional painting or sculpture. It captures split-second moments in time, peering into the faces of its subjects to find hidden expressions that might have gone unnoticed at first glance. Its medium is light, something that turns mundane landscapes into complex patterns. When I asked Friess about her perspective on photography, she echoed a similar sentiment.
“(Photographs) are so visceral and so relatable,” Friess. “Nearly everyone makes photographs on their phones; you have photographs of your family, your dinner and your home … your day-to-day. There’s this connection that people have to the medium. Even if you’re not thinking of those images as fine art, you’re constantly making them or consuming them.”
Ryder’s fictional monologue rings true then: more photos are being taken now than at any point in human history. In 2018, Forbes magazine estimated that over one trillion photos were taken across the globe. More photos are taken every few minutes than the sum total of all photographers before the invention of the smartphone. While many of these photos are shared on social media, billions are invariably lost to the amorphous cloud and buried in long-forgotten hard drives and Instagram archives. There are hundreds of millions of photos of fathers, mothers, dogs and lovers stored in an equal number of devices, and yet nearly all of them can be wiped away by a corrupted hard drive or a forgotten Google Photos password.
The digital noise can be overwhelming. Stop for a moment: step away from whichever preferred device you’re currently reading this article on and think. What photo did you take earlier today? What about yesterday or last week? How often have you gone back to a memory you captured with your phone? How often have you forgotten?
Looking at a photo on your phone is not necessarily an inferior viewing method, but it can numb you to the content of the photo itself; it’s no longer a unique image, but just another file taking up storage, whereas a physical photograph justifies its own presence — a point argued by Freiss.
“Seeing photos in person reminds you that these are objects that are made to be consumed,” Friess said. “They’re art objects and they have a craft and you can see things in person that you can’t see on your phone. It requires you to be present with the object in a way that’s really powerful.”
I follow a number of photographers online and swipe through dozens of posts a day. But I can’t recall exactly what photo stood out to me from yesterday’s doom scroll and, sometimes, I have to strain my eyes to make out details in images, already made smaller by a white border. This viewing experience is not always the intent of the artist; different screens showcase color in different ways — for example, a Dell laptop might make a photo look warmer than your iPhone screen would. With a printed image, these issues are reduced. The artist can present the exact colors they desire, and viewers can see the photo in an 8-by-10 format or larger on a well-lit wall.
If the UMMA is any indication, these opportunities to view physical prints have become increasingly rare. Friess told me that photography is still a relatively new medium for many collections.
“The history of the medium is complicated,” Friess said. “The intention hasn’t always been for these objects to end up in museums; the idea that there are even photography collections is only a generation or two old because it wasn’t considered to be a fine art. There are folks that still don’t think that certain kinds of photographs should be in museum collections.”
One historical example is color photography, which, until the 1970s, was seen as nothing more than, in photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s words, “bullshit” Absent the bold decisions of some pioneering photographers and their supporters in the art world, color photography was not easily available for enthusiasts to see. If you wanted to view what museums considered fine art, you were stuck with works in black and white, that is, unless you purchased actual photography books.
For photographers who were unable to display their work in museums, and for the keen fan looking for enjoyment or inspiration without leaving their house, the photo book, a literal book of one’s photos, historically democratized the art-viewing process in the same way that social media has today.
“Since its beginning, photography and the printed page were wedded together and there is a very long and very rich history of photo books,” Friess said. She also touched on her own experience with photo books. “There’s something magical that happens when you’re viewing photographs in person and there’s something magical that happens in the book. When you open it and it’s in your lap, you can see the cadence of images, you can flip back and forth and there’s negative space between a photograph on either page.”
Just recently, I acquired two new photo books. I purchased the aforementioned compilation of Dorothea Lange and another compilation of photographs by Robert Frank and Todd Webb, all taken in 1950s America. Opening the books, I can almost feel the emotions on the faces of their portraits and place myself in their landscapes. After just one day with Lange’s photos, I’ve already found inspiration for my own art and internalized the humanist motivation of her work.
Although these two books were compiled by separate authors, hundreds of other photographers have printed and are printing books and zines of their own images. The placement of their photos is carefully planned to tell a story with each turn of the page. Sebastião Salgado, in his book “Genesis,” meticulously lays out a story of indigenous lands and people persevering in the face of modern society. While his photos could be great when viewed in a museum, there’s something even more powerful about seeing these landscapes and cultures transported into your own home. Friess told me that, for many photographers, books are the only way they can envision their work.
“I talked to photographers and they wouldn’t even consider printing for the wall,” Friess said. “They’d be like ‘Of course I’ll print this for a book.’ There’s a narrative mindset in that way as opposed to sometimes you can only get one photograph — so can your story be told in a single image on a wall — versus a book which allows you to have (many).”
However, for many aspiring photographers, photo books are prohibitively expensive to create and to purchase. Even just my two books cost a total of $60, and that was only because they were on sale. In reality, both would usually cost that price on their own. Even when a photo book is intentionally shortened, it can still be out of budget for many. A single volume of selected works from William Eggleston’s “The Outlands” sells for $95; the full three volumes can cost up to $499.
Although you can find photo books for free at your local library, there’s no guarantee that they’ll have the specific work you’re looking for. You’d also be stripped of the experience of being able to simply pluck it off of your own bookshelf and seek inspiration within the comforts of your home. Museums step in to fill this void. A 2015 report by the Association of Art Museum Directors found that one-third of all museums allowed free entry and, among those with admissions, tickets typically cost less than $5. In all the cities I’ve visited, I’ve never had to pay for admission to see a photography exhibition. The existence of these spaces democratizes access to physical images and enriches an appreciation for the medium.
At the same time, museums remain limited. UMMA doesn’t have a dedicated photo gallery, and other institutions only showcase one exhibition at a time. If you go to the Art Institute of Chicago hoping to see modern pieces in color, you’re stuck with a story of photography in Germany and Japan during the mid-century. Even so, I’m not complaining about this; I’m excited to visit this exhibition during my trip to Chicago this summer.
A photograph truly is so much more than just an image. It’s the thing the grief-stricken return to in moments of solitude and what family shares to remember the faces of far-away relatives. It’s how we connect with strangers in far-flung places and contextualize historical events. And yet, today, it’s also electronic dust. In 100 years, how many of these digitized photos will be accessible? How will our distant descendants look at this modern world through our eyes if all the data disappears? A few months ago, I saw a cautionary post on social media. A photographer, already racked with grief, opened up about the death of their close friend, another photographer. Although the friend had backed up all of their photos to hard drives and uploaded them to the cloud, everything was wiped after their death. A rich legacy of photography — hundreds, if not thousands of images — were gone in an instant.
This summer, print out your photographs. Even if you’re not a professional photographer, send that beach photo to Walgreens. Frame the selfie you took with your mom and send your grandparents a hard copy of your recent trips. Save the photo booth strips you take with a friend and invest in a polaroid camera. Create something that’s real.
Statement Correspondent Joshua Nicholson can be reached at joshuni@umich.edu.
