Transcript
Speaker: Music
Speaker: Hi, I'm your host Ty, and welcome to Stories Worth Telling Forever.
Speaker: This episode is entitled, The Digital Attack on Memory.
Speaker: I'll explain why it's more than just our personal memories stored in photographs that are in danger, but also our collective history as recorded in the images we share both on physical and digital media.
Speaker: We'll talk with the co-founder of the Flickr Foundation, George Oates, about what they are doing to ensure that the Flickr Commons archive is preserved for the next 100 years.
Speaker: And we'll also chat with Brendan Flesher, a photographer and archivist exploring new technologies to ensure the images he uncovers can persist hundreds of years into the future.
Speaker: All of this and more in episode six of Stories Worth Telling Forever, stored permanently with a cord on Arweave for the next 200 plus years.
Speaker: As time changes, we change.
Speaker: How you feel at this moment likely isn't how you're going to feel a year from now.
Speaker: We know that.
Speaker: But do we realize how valuable that insight is?
Speaker: It can be like a switch.
Speaker: All of a sudden you realize the value of something, something you didn't even know you cared about.
Speaker: Like those boxes in your parents' attic full of old photographs and negatives.
Speaker: You dust it off, open it up, the photos kind of stick together a bit and then you see the faces, familiar faces.
Speaker: Wow, they look like that.
Speaker: The city looks so different, but it's still kind of the same.
Speaker: Was that me?
Speaker: And you realize this isn't a shoebox, it's a time portal.
Speaker: And somehow for a few minutes, you're living in 1993 and you're listening to Dinosaur Jr. on your Walkman and the world's a different place.
Speaker: And you can't believe your parents look younger than you do now.
Speaker: And it connects you to that time.
Speaker: And it's a reminder of how precious time is, how precious now is.
Speaker: And maybe you run up the stairs and you give your mom a hug.
Speaker: That's one scenario.
Speaker: But if you were born post-2000,
Speaker: it might look a little different.
Speaker: Instead of finding a shoebox in your parents' place, you find an old computer tower, maybe a flip phone,
Speaker: Maybe a first gen iPhone.
Speaker: If you're lucky, an old digital camera.
Speaker: If you're not so lucky, it has a Sony memory stick.
Speaker: And you think, hey, this might have some old photos on it.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: But it doesn't turn on.
Speaker: You pop out the memory stick.
Speaker: How do you even read a Sony memory stick?
Speaker: And then your stomach growls and you're like, let's see what's in the fridge.
Speaker: I'll come back to this.
Speaker: So you get your snack.
Speaker: And instead of going back up into that hot stuffy attic, you think, hey, maybe my folks shared or stored some photos online.
Speaker: You ask, and they did.
Speaker: They said they used something called MySpace.
Speaker: And at that point, you give up.
Speaker: The point is, these memories have value, but they're not safe.
Speaker: It's really weird, but it's possible that they could be safer in a physical form in a shoebox.
Speaker: But like, what does that mean in this digital era?
Speaker: You would assume that with digital, you know, they can be replicated, stored in multiple locations, in the cloud, but drives fail.
Speaker: Technology changes, and when you stop paying for the cloud, they don't stick your photos in a shoebox in the attic.
Speaker: They're gone.
Speaker: And that's why this episode is entitled, The Digital Attack on Memory.
Speaker: What makes this attack so effective is that we don't even know it's happening.
Speaker: We play right along with it and we trust that our images and the work that we do is just always going to be there.
Speaker: We are complicit for the most part in following along with the march of technology, assuming our things are safe.
Speaker: But the good news is we have some time.
Speaker: Most of our digital files can be recovered at this point.
Speaker: Even film negatives or prints, if they're around, they can be salvaged, digitized.
Speaker: But it's important to look at this now.
Speaker: If we fast forward 20 years, things look a lot worse.
Speaker: The rate at which technology is changing, we might not be able to interface with the tech that we are using even today.
Speaker: Also, we're really in danger of the physical media we have left, degrading to the point of being unusable, or perhaps the more likely scenario that these memories and even significant artworks end up in landfills.
Speaker: So we have this window to save things, to preserve photographs and memories for ourselves and for the future.
Speaker: But it's not just our personal memories under attack.
Speaker: We're also in danger of losing significant cultural and historical repositories of images.
Speaker: Consider a few examples.
Speaker: In 2001, Tom Sponheim, an American tourist, is on vacation in Barcelona.
Speaker: And he came across a bunch of negatives for sale at this flea market.
Speaker: He purchased them for less than $5.
Speaker: And once he's back from Spain, he starts scanning them into his computer.
Speaker: and he realizes he has found treasure.
Speaker: He has this series of remarkably high quality images capturing the daily life of people in Spain during the 60s, during the dictatorship of Franco.
Speaker: Now he wasn't able to find out how these images made their way to the flea market.
Speaker: Somewhere along the line, the value, the artistic merit that they had was completely overlooked.
Speaker: And so Tom found this and for the next decade, he worked to find out who the photographer was behind these images.
Speaker: with the help of a Spanish photography historian they figured out that these images were from a photographer named Milagros Caterla.
Speaker: Now sadly her work went mostly unnoticed during her lifetime but through this discovery we now have this window into a place and time that could have been forgotten and when you look at her work
Speaker: It's so hard to imagine that it was overlooked and that somehow by chance, before these things had disappeared, you know, those negatives ended up in a flea market, thankfully purchased by someone who took the time to see their value.
Speaker: Another example, Eugene de Salinac.
Speaker: His work was discovered in 1999 by Michael Lorenzini, a senior photographer for the New York City Department of Record.
Speaker: He was doing research at the archive, and he started to notice that there was this collection of early 20th century images that was different.
Speaker: These images weren't just historical documents, but they were artistic and consistent in their style.
Speaker: And it became obvious to him that this was the work of one photographer.
Speaker: He was captivated.
Speaker: And so Lorenzini dug deeper, and after a pretty extensive investigation, he found that this was the work of Eugene de Salanac.
Speaker: and that he had worked as the official photographer for the department of bridges plant and structures from 1906 to 1934. during that time he had taken over 20 000 images it was overlooked forgotten for decades
Speaker: So since the discovery of his work, it's now featured in books, exhibitions, and it really tells the story through images of how one of the great cities of our time came to be.
Speaker: You know, it's so close to being forgotten, permanently mothballed, slipping through the cracks, just another victim of budget cuts that really were incapable of perceiving the value locked inside this archive.
Speaker: Now there's one more example I'd like to point out, and it's possibly one you've heard of.
Speaker: It's the work of Vivian Meyer.
Speaker: A woman whose work and story has entranced and stunned many by its volume, its beauty, and the humanity that she captured through the lens of her camera.
Speaker: She was, as they say, a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.
Speaker: An undercover street photography ninja poet disguised as a nanny.
Speaker: And her life seemed built around the passion that she had for photography.
Speaker: But the paradox was that she seemed so content with the boxes and boxes of her amazing work
Speaker: remaining unseen.
Speaker: First of all, by herself.
Speaker: She hadn't seen most of her work.
Speaker: It was unprocessed film.
Speaker: But she also seemed okay with it being forgotten, never discovered.
Speaker: And only through a series of small miracles was her work ever found and shared and now beloved.
Speaker: She was born in New York in 1926, and her work as a photographer spanned 50 years.
Speaker: Her collection is estimated to be somewhere around 200,000 negatives.
Speaker: What did she do with that amount of physical media?
Speaker: Well, as she moved and downsized in later years, she kept her work in these rented storage facilities.
Speaker: But in 2007, two years before she passed away, she forfeited on the storage lockers.
Speaker: and these units stocked with her life's work were auctioned.
Speaker: Now, first they were auctioned by collectors who had no idea what they were buying, but willing to take the chance.
Speaker: So they maybe thought that they were old and contained something of value, but people didn't always dig deeper.
Speaker: You know, finding this cache of negatives didn't mean that those who acquired them would actually take the time to develop, scan them and see what they revealed.
Speaker: The negatives and cameras were then sold again to photo collectors
Speaker: who also initially had no idea the kinds of images contained in these boxes.
Speaker: Now a man by the name of John Maloof put in an absentee bid of $400 on the largest box that ended up containing some 30,000 negatives.
Speaker: And to give you an idea of the quality of the work they found, John Maloof and another collector, Jeffrey Goldstein,
Speaker: they quit their jobs and began working with making books and documentaries about Vivian's work.
Speaker: One of these was called Finding Vivian Meyer, and it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Speaker: You know, countless books were written, theories were hatched, all in an attempt to explain how it was that such a talented, prolific photographer and artist lived her life as a nanny caregiver and passed away
Speaker: with those who knew her unaware of the magnitude of her work.
Speaker: Was it a mental illness?
Speaker: A tumultuous past?
Speaker: Well, I'm not going to dip my toe into the photo developer to try to explain those theories.
Speaker: But you know, what if it really wasn't that complicated?
Speaker: What if she just loved taking photos?
Speaker: It's obvious she was a private person.
Speaker: She didn't have many close relationships, but could that be that's kind of how she liked it?
Speaker: As a nanny, it's like having a family with your evenings and weekends off to take photos, to do what you like.
Speaker: Even when you're working, you're taking the kids on a field trip, maybe it's really a photo trip.
Speaker: And maybe she didn't develop a lot of her work or share it because for her, it wasn't about that.
Speaker: I've noticed that sometimes people say they don't take pictures because they want to be present.
Speaker: But I never really understood that because
Speaker: A camera doesn't mean you don't experience the world around you.
Speaker: In some ways, it can heighten your senses and even help you to perceive the world in a richer way.
Speaker: And if you're taking photos in public of people who you don't know, a camera also gives you a reason to be there without needing a reason to be there.
Speaker: Could it have been photography for the love of photography?
Speaker: Talking with a friend about Vivian and her work and the theories about why she did things this way.
Speaker: In one conversation, someone mentioned a climber named Marc-André Leclerc, and he had set all of these solo climbing records.
Speaker: But a lot of the time, it was other people who broke the news for him.
Speaker: He himself avoided the limelight.
Speaker: He didn't share his exploits on social media.
Speaker: And there was a documentary film about him called The Alpinist.
Speaker: And if you watch it, you really get the sense he climbed for climbing, for the challenge, the adventure, the connection with nature.
Speaker: It was about the achievement for him and about finding his own limits.
Speaker: Perhaps Vivian was a purist like Marc-Andre.
Speaker: All of these examples, they share a common thread.
Speaker: Talented photographer.
Speaker: Unknown at the time.
Speaker: Work could have been lost because of reasons.
Speaker: And it wasn't.
Speaker: And it makes you think, it makes you wonder, you know, how many more Vivian Myers are out there
Speaker: And sadly, how many were there out there that could have been lost?
Speaker: Time is not on our side to find them.
Speaker: And one man that understands this is Brendan Flesher, a photographer and archivist exploring new technologies to ensure the images he uncovers can persist hundreds of years into the future.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So let's talk about these negatives that you found, like this estate of a photographer who had passed away.
Speaker: Maybe you can just run us through like how that all went down.
Speaker: Me being my usual self, I was just going through Craigslist and somebody
Speaker: was flipping a home, the owner had passed away and really didn't have any immediate family.
Speaker: So all of his possessions were still there and basically said, you know, dark room for sale, photography equipment.
Speaker: And, um, so, you know, it already piqued my interest.
Speaker: I went there and the guys in the process was pitching as much stuff as he could and kind of up next on the line there were the negatives.
Speaker: And, you know, for me, I was just like, okay, well, you know, what hurts, you know, grabbing some negatives already got a truckload of stuff, might as well add in a couple of boxes and,
Speaker: From there, I was able to find out this person's style of photography and really just find out he was a really talented photographer.
Speaker: And I think he was someone who was proud of his work.
Speaker: So it would have been a real shame to see it basically go into the dumpster.
Speaker: Can you say who the photographer was?
Speaker: Yeah, his name is Gary Nogues.
Speaker: I'm not too sure just for privacy reasons, how much, why should
Speaker: delve into the person's life, but yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, exceptional photographer and very, and I think you saw, he was very happy to show his, show his work, you know, entered a lot of local like galleries, for example.
Speaker: Let's maybe just talk about the images a little bit that you found.
Speaker: I didn't realize that he was a kind of like a news photographer, but thinking about that, like Bay Area, California, 70s, 80s, that was a pretty significant time.
Speaker: George Moscone, Harvey Milk, you know, they were shot in City Hall, I believe.
Speaker: Just out of curiosity, like, was there any images of sort of the happenings around that time period?
Speaker: I would say...
Speaker: more so emergencies, whether it be fires or I think whether it be just police interactions.
Speaker: But that would have been quite interesting to come across, no doubt about it.
Speaker: Especially, I think, living, I live like three hours from San Francisco, but you still get a lot of that, a lot of Bay Area folks who move to the area.
Speaker: So there's been a few times where I've come across images from San Francisco during this period or even in the 60s, which obviously I think is a really interesting place and time.
Speaker: So that's also kind of a motivation.
Speaker: One day maybe I'll come across some sort of like 1960s treasure trove of images of San Francisco.
Speaker: You know, that alone would have such incredible value, I think.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I really look forward to getting the chance to see a few more of his images.
Speaker: It definitely transports you to that era, like just looking at those pictures.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: And it's nice because a lot of the contact sheets were also included.
Speaker: So you can actually see what images he would have, what images he liked.
Speaker: which images may have been printed.
Speaker: And so a lot of the ones I included were ones I kind of knew that he would have liked.
Speaker: I think he also worked for a local Bay Area radio station because he also had photos.
Speaker: He also had photos of Bruce Springsteen at the time.
Speaker: Do you have some ideas about how you might want to go about sharing his images?
Speaker: That's a good question.
Speaker: I guess one of the
Speaker: interesting ways I've tried so far is through YouTube.
Speaker: Of course, I think that way you can get more context to the images.
Speaker: You know, I've found a new place to put these on a more permanent basis.
Speaker: So I'm, I'm, I'm still exploring into that of course, but I think it's quite promising accord, especially for the ability to organize and publicly share them.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: The idea, you know, it's not just like uploading to Apple, but like, Hey, like this content can be digitally stored beyond my lifetime.
Speaker: Yeah, that's quite nice.
Speaker: And I think just from like a from artistic standpoint, absolutely.
Speaker: And then a historic standpoint, you know, especially having worked in archives, obviously, there's a lot of limit like limits as to an archive can share and just sheer volume.
Speaker: But nonetheless, I think to be able to access like high quality
Speaker: images in such a way is really invaluable for a lot of people.
Speaker: You know, I really hope that there's a bit of a spark that helps more people think about these images that could be around them, you know, grad sales with family that are in danger of kind of being rescued and preserved.
Speaker: Because, you know, if we don't take action, the fact is, is although these negatives could last longer, like outlast, maybe even our digital stuff at some point, if we don't do something, they will eventually degrade to the point of not being usable.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: I think that's one of those things where I know in my local area, our university has like a archive, for example, but so many of the images were contributed only by a couple of people who
Speaker: Somehow I think they might've come across the images the same way that I have.
Speaker: And that just tells you just how much important documents and images can be found through one person, the work of one person, and maybe even just getting some sort of word out.
Speaker: So people aren't tossing boxes out with those types of images, you know, obviously like personal images have their own value to the family and sentimental value, but I think there's also a possibility of seeking out these types of images,
Speaker: you know, have a greater importance to them in the end.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I was thinking about like Gary's work that you found, like it kind of made me stop and think about how close it was to just being lost.
Speaker: What would have happened to it if you hadn't come across it?
Speaker: Yeah, it would have been, it would have been good as gone.
Speaker: I mean, in the dump.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I know, and I know, like, for example, he was also a sports photographer for a couple of junior colleges in the area.
Speaker: And I'd even contacted junior colleges.
Speaker: Like, you know, I have all these negatives.
Speaker: As much as I love sports, I don't need 100 negatives from like a junior college of football or something.
Speaker: So I contact them like, oh, we don't want these.
Speaker: We don't conform, you know.
Speaker: So it's interesting because I guess not everyone has that same interest.
Speaker: Even people who are working in the archival setting, maybe they have their own
Speaker: limitations as to what they can save or just lack of interest.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, that, yeah, that's really surprising.
Speaker: So like, I just, you know, hopefully we can create this space where people that do value it, like there's somewhere you can go.
Speaker: And sometimes it's just like, at the moment, we don't.
Speaker: But like, as time passes, you, your feelings about things change, right?
Speaker: Oh, absolutely.
Speaker: I could write, not a book, but maybe a pamphlet about that, just
Speaker: because I've, in my personal life, I've suffered like major property loss along with my whole family, as in, you know, we're, you know, left with nothing, nothing of our own.
Speaker: And from that, you know, we lost also just all these family images from the past 100 plus 150 years.
Speaker: And really, it tells you just the importance of maybe safeguarding them, both from the garbage or from destruction.
Speaker: And then also,
Speaker: perhaps finding a secondary way to, to save them before it's too late.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: I don't know if that's something you want to talk about at all, but just out of curiosity, was it like a fire or a disaster or something?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm from a paradise originally.
Speaker: And that was a town that got wiped out the campfire in 2018.
Speaker: So it was like 19,000 homes.
Speaker: I went down that day and
Speaker: Yeah, all of our stuff too, unfortunately.
Speaker: And there was, I was kind of, since I had been interested in history and photography, I had kind of been the person who was safeguarding a lot of the images and, and yeah, I was not able to get anything from the house that day.
Speaker: So it all, it all went, but you know, we have some scraps of images that some family members had also that, so we do have photos, but you know, most of it was all, it was all wiped out, unfortunately.
Speaker: Man, that is, I'm so sorry to hear that.
Speaker: It's a reality that a lot of people face, especially in the, I mean, look at what's happening in Canada right now.
Speaker: I mean, I haven't been around lately, but I think if you go, I mean, there's probably quite a bit of smoke in a few areas, even stretching down further south into the U.S. You're right.
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, where I am, like, I mean, today's okay, but we've had a few pretty smoky days.
Speaker: It's kind of got the red sun out there and everything.
Speaker: But yeah, I do remember watching the documentary on Paradise and what happened there.
Speaker: And it's just like, I've thought about this scenario in my mind.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: But you just don't, you never expect it.
Speaker: It's pretty cliche it to happen to you, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, we, we didn't near expected it, but nonetheless, like one of the few things you could preserve as personal property would be images.
Speaker: I just wasn't proactive saving these images digitally.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: It makes you sort of stop and think about, okay, like if something like that was to happen, you know, what are the things that you can't replace?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think images would be one of them, but to be able to, in the age that we are in, to digitize and to save them permanently on either online basis or multiple spaces at once, I mean, that's pretty invaluable.
Speaker: And really, if one wants to be proactive, if they know, okay, I live in an area that you never know, could get wiped off the face of the earth someday.
Speaker: Well, shoot, I guess that's a good starting point to...
Speaker: to have one less regret perhaps.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I'm glad that you and your family are, are okay.
Speaker: Oh yeah.
Speaker: Like were you, had you already evacuated at the time?
Speaker: I was living, I was in Germany.
Speaker: So I, I, you know, I was luckier than most in that I had a place to sleep the next night.
Speaker: My family, they, they weren't so fortunate in that regard.
Speaker: They had to deal with the trauma of the day, but they landed on their feet.
Speaker: So, you know, we all feel fortunate in the grand scheme, but it definitely, uh,
Speaker: changes your perspective in some ways, I would say, and gave me a little more motivation to just continue with my photography as well as some sort of preservation as it is.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: You know, thinking too about, I know we've been talking about Gary's work there as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I will say he, where he lived was like, gosh, only about a couple football fields away from where the fire stopped.
Speaker: So like in his case, yeah, I mean,
Speaker: You would have lost all of his stuff.
Speaker: It all made it.
Speaker: And he has some, he has unfortunately scant images of my area.
Speaker: So I'm still looking to see if I can come across images of my hometown, you know, in some sort of physical form before the fire.
Speaker: Yeah, thinking about that, that would be such an awesome archive, like a paradise archive.
Speaker: How many negatives and things were destroyed in that fire?
Speaker: Oh, I mean, countless.
Speaker: Yeah, if you ever need any help with creating an archive with that, like that is something I would absolutely love to be a part of because that's kind of you to offer.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: I mean, very, yeah, because I'm also a little bit of a stalwart for preserving local history in that regard.
Speaker: And there's not many people who might not notice or care much about it, but
Speaker: I think it's worth saving.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I look forward to maybe possibly finding out more about like a paradise archive or something like that in the future.
Speaker: I think that'd be super cool.
Speaker: And really, you helped me kind of, not remind me, but even just kind of get my mind going on it a little bit more because it hadn't been something I'd really dwelled on much, but I think it's a good direction to go in and just...
Speaker: Also, you know, it's like it's it's not a picture of a building that's still there.
Speaker: It's something that all these things are completely unrecognizable and gone now, yet very vivid in our memories, I guess I guess you would say very vivid indeed in our memories.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's, I think the importance of it is multifaceted because the truth of the matter is, is like wildfire is something that is, it's happening more and more.
Speaker: And I mean, it's the condition of the planet, right?
Speaker: So
Speaker: It's one thing to know that like that's happening out there, but then to see the result is like, this is a town that no longer exists.
Speaker: It's important historically, but it's also, you know, a warning for all of us, right?
Speaker: To like realize like, hey, this is what's happening.
Speaker: This is what could happen to more places.
Speaker: I think that's just another motivation to be proactive in one's photography also to photograph these things before you burn up.
Speaker: Because I know after the fire, there have been a few areas that
Speaker: kind of run to the same threat before and I photographed them just out of pure interest.
Speaker: And now they're also like complete, just were raised to the ground.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: So is there going to be some more information about these other negatives that you've come across?
Speaker: Like, I'm just kind of curious, like there's a story attached to them as well.
Speaker: Like there was with Gary's.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And there's some new finds, especially that I think are really interesting.
Speaker: A couple undeveloped black and white negatives they'd been shot before.
Speaker: After developing, they came out pretty much like as if they were shot yesterday.
Speaker: So these latent images have been around.
Speaker: for at least 40 years and in the negative density, the contract, everything was like perfect.
Speaker: I mean, straight out of the negative, I didn't have to do anything to really overcome any sort of aging.
Speaker: And all these images were bikini models in the seventies.
Speaker: I had done some sort of bikini model shoot.
Speaker: Don't know the person.
Speaker: It was probably Southern California and it was definitely the seventies, but it was funny just piecing that together and just coming across that in general.
Speaker: That was probably,
Speaker: one of the more interesting finds in a while.
Speaker: I bet you must've been kind of half shocked when you saw those come out.
Speaker: Come on.
Speaker: That's a, that's seventies gold right there.
Speaker: Gosh.
Speaker: How did you come across that?
Speaker: I just, I'd bought a box of cameras and I had some old negative old rolls of film in them.
Speaker: And these rolls of film had been sitting out in the California sun for probably a couple of years.
Speaker: I mean, they were in the heat.
Speaker: They were just, you know, as abused as they can be.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: They produce some crazy like mint images.
Speaker: I mean, I couldn't believe it still.
Speaker: And so I'm looking forward to sharing those as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Thank you, Brandon.
Speaker: Thanks, Ty.
Speaker: I had a great time talking with you.
Speaker: I appreciate it.
Speaker: Talking with Brendan, sometimes it feels like we're just waiting for the rest of the world to realize that the clock is ticking and that precious images and memories are in danger of disappearing.
Speaker: But maybe this is just how it starts, with a few people like Brendan using their own time and resources to preserve these smaller historical archives.
Speaker: I'll make sure and leave a link for you to check out the archive he's building on our weave at accord.com.
Speaker: Just 10 or 20 years ago, you know, for an individual to archive their work in a digital way and maintain redundancy in it, a decent level of quality, it was just cost prohibitive.
Speaker: With the price of storage continuing to go down and with new technologies like Arweave making it possible to store your content in a decentralized way, it feels like these tools are arriving just in time.
Speaker: The amount of content at stake is staggering.
Speaker: One of the earliest resources online that enabled people to store, share, and build community around images was Flickr.
Speaker: Launched in the early 2000s and still going strong today, it is home to over 50 billion images and also hosts the Commons, archiving historically significant images from nations, museums, and libraries around the world.
Speaker: But Flickr is a company and companies don't always last forever.
Speaker: And some companies know that and they plan ahead for the time when they could be sold, rebranded or well, you just don't know.
Speaker: Despite being a company, Flickr is looking for ways to ensure the images that have been entrusted to its platform can persist.
Speaker: through a separate foundation independent from flickr.com.
Speaker: Let's find out what they're up to and chat with George Oates, co-founder of the Flickr Foundation.
Speaker: I thought it was pretty interesting to find out that you've kind of been with Flickr since the beginning.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Well, I've actually kind of worked.
Speaker: I worked at Flickr once.
Speaker: That was at the beginning, yeah, from about 2003 before it was launched till about 2008.
Speaker: And I don't actually work for Flickr now.
Speaker: I work for this new organization, the Flickr Foundation.
Speaker: So that was sort of in the beginning before Flickr was sold to Yahoo.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Well, actually, Yahoo bought Flickr in the year 2005, which lots of people have forgotten, interestingly.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, it was very young and very sort of hot on the web when Yahoo acquired it in 2005.
Speaker: And actually it was on the same day as they also acquired a bookmarking service called Delicious and this really excellent kind of event explorer called Upcoming.
Speaker: And, you know, we all started at Yahoo on the same day in 2005, which is kind of weird.
Speaker: But, yeah, it's sort of interesting how lots of people sort of claim that Yahoo ruined Flickr but actually, you know, depending on which glasses you're wearing,
Speaker: Yahoo really helped Flickr to become so big because Yahoo really knew how to plug into the internet infrastructure.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I think I've probably fallen to that camp of some of the people that had some misconceptions about all of this.
Speaker: But let me explain why I felt that way.
Speaker: Just thinking back to Flickr and when it started, I probably started using it a lot like 2009, 2010, something like around that era.
Speaker: And, you know, it was awesome.
Speaker: Like, it was one of my favorite places ever on the internet.
Speaker: You know, it's kind of it's basically how I learned to take pictures, to be honest.
Speaker: So it's like, you know, it's an educational resource.
Speaker: It's also like this time capsule kind of thing where I can kind of go back and see how.
Speaker: you progress and even now I can go back in my photo stream and sort of like relive those kind of moments that I experienced.
Speaker: And then, you know, the design was special.
Speaker: You know, I think one of the things that made it so special was just like the look and feel of the photo stream.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Right?
Speaker: Like your images actually had space to breathe.
Speaker: It was sort of similar to maybe like a gallery or something like that.
Speaker: And I think it kind of drew a lot of artists and photographers because of that.
Speaker: While at the same time, somehow seemed to have like this design that facilitated a real community feeling.
Speaker: Hmm.
Speaker: So, yeah, it was special, but then things kind of changed.
Speaker: I'm not exactly sure of the dates, but I would assume it would be maybe 2012, somewhere around there.
Speaker: There was some pretty big design changes, and I remember people kind of talking about, like, oh, maybe I should go somewhere else.
Speaker: Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker: So like that early design, was that you?
Speaker: Were you part of that?
Speaker: Yeah, sure was.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Um, I was the designer at Flickr.
Speaker: Um, well, yeah, for the first kind of three or four years of my work there.
Speaker: So yeah, I, I wrote all the website copy and, you know, HTML and all that.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: and designed most of the user interfaces with help from other people, of course, but yeah, I'm very proud of that.
Speaker: So yeah, there's definitely been a lot of changes over, you know, since the beginning of Flickr and then it changed hands a few times.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Flickr was started by a company called Ludicorp in Vancouver in 2000 and it launched in 2004.
Speaker: Then it was acquired by Yahoo in 2005.
Speaker: So the small team of, I think there were nine or 10 of us at the time we moved to San Francisco.
Speaker: And then Yahoo actually was acquired by a couple of other businesses.
Speaker: Let me see if I can remember.
Speaker: One was called Verizon, which is a gigantic media company.
Speaker: And then I think Verizon was eaten by an even bigger fish, which is called Oath.
Speaker: Then Yahoo was looking to sell off services that it thought weren't working.
Speaker: And Flickr was one of those.
Speaker: So Flickr was almost kind of destroyed in 2017, something like that.
Speaker: But luckily there were some insiders at the company who reached out to SmugMug who bought it from Yahoo in 2018.
Speaker: So it's had a bit of a sort of tumultuous journey, including a near-death experience, which is yet another justification, I feel, for the creation of Flickr.org, which is...
Speaker: trying to help just buffet some of those corporate pressures on the collection.
Speaker: It is crazy to think that it was close to death, you could say, because it's such a valuable resource.
Speaker: I don't know if it was I was reading or I heard in another interview that there's something like 50 billion images stored on Flickr.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Isn't that crazy?
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: It boggles.
Speaker: It's one of those numbers that you just can't really conceive of how much storage is required, for example, to preserve all those images.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Flick is almost 20 years old as well, which is an interesting factor.
Speaker: And also, I think there's a bigger picture here too, Ty, which is that
Speaker: Flickr is also not the only platform on the internet which collects materials like photographs, you know.
Speaker: Facebook is another example that's probably maybe 10 times as big a collection as Flickr.
Speaker: I don't even know, maybe five or 10 times, you know.
Speaker: And then there's services like, you know, Reddit or, you know, actually there's a lot of Google properties like YouTube and other things like that, which are now the places where we put our cultural heritage, you know.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: We sort of don't think of it that way because we're all just like publishing our lives all day into like whatever social media platform we're choosing to love at the moment, you know.
Speaker: But actually what's happening is we're sort of generating these born digital collections in a way we've never done before, you know.
Speaker: And I'm looking at that going, you know, geez, we've got to, you know, address this because, you know,
Speaker: You know, a corporation is one type of organisation and a traditional archive is another type of organisation.
Speaker: And actually they don't really work together directly very much ever at all.
Speaker: We need to build some kind of bridge between them for all these digital properties.
Speaker: And that's where Fidel lives, you know.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And I mean, you can, you can see, you know, which, which of those organizations tends to live longer.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: I'm glad you said that.
Speaker: I didn't say that.
Speaker: Well, yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, I, I do believe like from what I can tell in my own experience that Flickr seems to be in good hands right now.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like it, it took time to prove that maybe to, you know, the people that use the platform, but it seems like they care at least about as much about the platform as
Speaker: and its content as they do about it being a sustainable business.
Speaker: So that's kind of rare to have this massive platform not in the hands of a major ginormous tech conglomerate, right?
Speaker: Yes, I think so too.
Speaker: I mean, just the fact that, pardon me, the McCaskill brothers who are the owners of SmugMug, just the fact, well, Ben approached me for a start to see if I'd like to come back and help them sort of think about that more long-term stuff.
Speaker: And yeah,
Speaker: you know, when I proposed the idea of the foundation to them, they accepted the idea.
Speaker: And, you know, that's weird and really positive and good.
Speaker: And also the company's doing really good works around, you know, climate certification.
Speaker: They're working on their B Corp certification.
Speaker: They've joined the Conservation Alliance.
Speaker: You know, they're making all these sort of good corporate strides to be, well,
Speaker: frankly, distance themselves, I think, from the giant scary megacorps, you know?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, that's definitely, I think that's one of the things too, just to think that they were totally cool with this idea.
Speaker: Like they're thinking beyond whatever happens to Flickr in the future.
Speaker: Like this needs to last.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So the goal is to preserve images for a hundred years.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: Yeah, that's the sort of, that's the, the beacon, you know, the directive.
Speaker: What are you wanting to preserve?
Speaker: Is it, I mean, 50 billion images, that's a lot.
Speaker: So is it more like specific the, what you're targeting?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That's a very tricky question.
Speaker: It's, um, you know, most archivists will tell you, well, let's just gather it all up now and we can sort it out later, you know,
Speaker: And don't get me wrong, there is also a lot of crap on Flickr.
Speaker: You know, there's a lot of like clip art from the web, you know, just a bunch of crap that doesn't really need to be saved for posterity.
Speaker: But your opinion might be different from my opinion.
Speaker: Maybe you think that clip art, whatever it is, is fantastic, you know, of historical worth, you know.
Speaker: So that's a whole kind of approach that needs to be developed is what's called
Speaker: sometimes a collection development policy and also, you know, the ability to reevaluate what's in the collection and sort of, you know, jettison things that are no longer useful or, you know, like just for example, if there's two copies of the same image, do we need to keep both copies?
Speaker: That's a fairly general example.
Speaker: But I mean, I've got tons of ideas about how to manage that sort of selection process.
Speaker: And I'm hoping to develop a way that makes it also that user-generated so it's never a kind of top-down decree, which, you know, if you know the history of Flickr, you know that we never really made, you know, proclamations on how people should organise their pictures or even describe them for that matter.
Speaker: So I'm hoping to sort of continue that general mindset, which is you get to choose, you know.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker: And there's also a really big difference too sort of archivally from putting a bunch of stuff on Amazon Web Services versus actually doing, you know, resolute and robust digital preservation.
Speaker: That's also territory which we need to explore because at the moment, Flicky lives on Amazon Web Services, right?
Speaker: And even though Amazon Web Services, the tech there is freaking amazing, you know, it's a very wealthy system,
Speaker: They've got billions of engineers and tons of cash and it's all great.
Speaker: But it's also in the hands of a corporation, which is, you know, a tension or a risk for the long-term preservation.
Speaker: I'm also curious about decentralisation as a technique to sort of, you know, break apart the archive and, you know, stash copies everywhere, that kind of thing.
Speaker: I've wondered about the actual amount of space we would need to have sort of real estate-wise to print everything out as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like...
Speaker: Well, yeah, I mean, 50 billion images, right?
Speaker: Like how many books would that take?
Speaker: You've got a hundred images in a book.
Speaker: It's like 500 million books or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Even if you stack them real close in kind of archival boxes and stick them in warehouses, you still need like
Speaker: 50 warehouses or something, you know?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like in my mind, I think about this stuff sometimes and I'm like, okay, so, you know, if you've got a physical file, like how could that be destroyed?
Speaker: I mean, you imagine like fire or something like that.
Speaker: And then you've got, you know, digit different forms of digital.
Speaker: You've got it on your phone.
Speaker: Phones can die.
Speaker: Hard drives can die.
Speaker: Then we've got the cloud.
Speaker: It's a little bit more, there's some redundancy there.
Speaker: It's a little safer.
Speaker: And then, you know, but it's still a business.
Speaker: It could be sold.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So then when I think of decentralized, it's like, well, you know, it's kind of like there have to be like loss of power in like 50 different cities or something like some global catastrophe, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: To knock that out.
Speaker: But then we wouldn't really be worried about photos.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: No, I think you're right.
Speaker: I think there's something else going on.
Speaker: It's Godzilla or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I really don't guess.
Speaker: And then, you know, like I've also been doing some research into people like Vivian Meyer and there's other photographers sort of being discovered now.
Speaker: Like there's this, I don't know exactly how to say her name, but there's another, a Russian woman who has sort of a similar backstory to Vivian Meyer.
Speaker: They found it like a cache of her photos.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: But I feel like we're sort of in this special time period where like this stuff still exists.
Speaker: It hasn't totally decayed yet.
Speaker: And we can find these negatives and digitize them.
Speaker: But like, I don't know, 20, 30 years from now, like that stuff might be gone.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: True that.
Speaker: I actually read an article about somebody who decided to start shooting film in order to preserve his images.
Speaker: So he's just kind of like, he had these bad experiences and he's like, you know what?
Speaker: I know if I shoot film, like I can just throw it in a box and it will still be there.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: I feel that.
Speaker: I think he might be right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think only a few percentage points worth of humans actually think about archiving in a really rigorous way.
Speaker: Actually, I think the type of humans that are also photographers are,
Speaker: you know, do lean towards, you know, organising their stuff a bit or having, you know, sheets of negs or, you know, have some sort of representation of the photographs that they've taken, you know, because they're producing.
Speaker: I've heard some artists are also really good archivists, you know, but I think there are certain types of humans that care a lot more than others about keeping their stuff in an orderly way.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You must have some pretty good insights on that because obviously creating this foundation, you're, you're looking for the people that care about this in order to keep the foundation going.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I would be curious to find out like, what is the general response?
Speaker: To the creation of the foundation?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like, are you finding enough like-minded people that care about this stuff?
Speaker: I think the,
Speaker: In general, the response has been very warm and very positive.
Speaker: I think it's mostly from people who are fond of Flickr.com.
Speaker: It's interesting because I've just been doing some, I guess, teaching or, you know, when you help out some undergrad students at Goldsmith Design School, which is here in London, and, you know, these students are around 20 years old and they're
Speaker: I sort of brought the idea of the Flickr Foundation to the class and they were sort of like, oh, my God, the, you know, the aesthetic's really outdated and all these kind of things that, you know, the young people say.
Speaker: And it took them quite a while to come around to this idea that actually what we've got here is a really, well, enormous but also really interesting representation of
Speaker: frankly, of humanity in the last 20 years, you know, and you can interrogate it by any time and any place and you'll find pictures of that place and isn't that amazing, you know.
Speaker: And it sort of, it took them a while to kind of wrap their head around the scale of the thing, I think, the depth of it.
Speaker: Because Instagram, I mean, if you contrast Instagram and Flickr, obviously Instagram is also huge, but, you know, the social practice on Instagram is just amazing
Speaker: you know, miles away from what it's like on Flickr.
Speaker: Cause you know, you're just scrolling.
Speaker: It's very ad heavy now, you know, try and find a photo that you saw last week or even yesterday, you know, it's just totally different.
Speaker: Um, but there's a real depth and richness to Flickr, which is worth looking out for.
Speaker: And I think people do respond to that.
Speaker: And, you know, they also do, I think, respond to that bigger concern that I have, which is about
Speaker: the other platforms on the internet that are also just gathering this stuff at this huge rate, you know, the fact that we need to start addressing that, uh, moon, otherwise, you know, more will disappear.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I loved having this opportunity to chat with you and yeah, I'm really looking forward to see what happens with the archive and with the team and the foundation.
Speaker: I feel very, uh, very lucky to have,
Speaker: maneuvered into this position because it really is exciting and I, you know, I feel it very deeply, the sort of fondness and the desire to look after it.
Speaker: And so, you know, that motivation is easy.
Speaker: But then you're like, well, what happens when I die?
Speaker: How do I communicate this kind of love to the person who's going to take the reins, you know, and then the person after that and the person after that?
Speaker: There's going to be, you know, at least let's say 10 plus directors of the Flickr Foundation in a hundred years.
Speaker: How are we going to make sure that like director number 10 fills the same kind of pool as I do?
Speaker: And that's a whole other question, a whole other challenge about sort of organization itself, you know, not the photos even, but the foundation and what, you know, how that's laid out.
Speaker: And I don't know how to do that time.
Speaker: Well, I mean, you kind of did it a little bit with Flickr, right?
Speaker: I mean, it's continued to this point, which is pretty amazing.
Speaker: And a lot of those core people from the beginning are still there.
Speaker: And I was worried about Flickr losing its soul at some point, but I feel like it hasn't.
Speaker: That's good to hear.
Speaker: With a good foundation, right?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I think that has a good chance.
Speaker: I'm happy to know that you're there.
Speaker: Thank you so much for your time today.
Speaker: Hey, no worries.
Speaker: It's nice to talk to you.
Speaker: Maybe this will be the episode that gets us on the front page of Apple Podcasts.
Speaker: It's okay.
Speaker: You can be honest.
Speaker: I can take it.
Speaker: I mean, good luck with that.
Speaker: I'll call my mom and that's about my PR experience.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: I'll take all the moms I can get.
Speaker: Okay, Todd.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thanks, George.
Speaker: It was awesome to get the chance to talk with George and Brendan.
Speaker: It's easy to see why they are so passionate about preserving these different pieces of history.
Speaker: They give us a window into a time that no longer exists.
Speaker: But it's more than just a curiosity, it's a record.
Speaker: It's a story that grounds us and helps us to understand where we are now.
Speaker: But what about us?
Speaker: Maybe you're not scouring the classifieds for state sales and negatives, and maybe we haven't been asked to somehow figure out how to archive 50 billion images for 100 years.
Speaker: But creating a record of now and saving it for hundreds of years is actually very doable.
Speaker: One of the easiest ways to do that is to visit our site at foreverstories.xyz.
Speaker: There we've made it possible for anyone to record a message directly onto Arweave and the permaweb.
Speaker: Give it a try and you'll get a link to your recording that you can save and share with someone, maybe 100 years in the future.
Speaker: Talking about and researching the digital attack on memory has been eye-opening and a valuable reminder of how close our digital and physical records are to disappearing.
Speaker: And it would be really sad if no new solutions were being developed to change this status quo.
Speaker: But that's not the case.
Speaker: Armed with new insight and new technologies, the future looks bright for those looking to preserve their memories.
Speaker: I'm Ty, and I'd like to thank all of you for being a part of stories worth telling forever.
