Extracted from The Independent on Sunday (a British broadsheet) 24/10/04


Flash, bang, wallop! What's a JPEG?
... I had forgotten about Grandpa Bean's darkroom until last week's New Scientist, which ran a leader entitled "Farewell film, and thanks for all the pics", explaining that digital photography was now it and the days of silver and chemical dyes were now more or less over.....
... I began to contemplate what we were losing. Not just the old and magical synthesis of art and chemistry. Nor just an entire constellation of tricks and skills and gadgets which will soon be as forgotten as alchemy: the ground-glass screens, the secret formulae, the phtographic paper in its black lightproof bags inside the yellow boxes, the range of chemical smells as evocative as Ma Griffe, the f-stops and light meters and rules of thumb, the glazing drums and drying racks, the changing-bags test prints, timers and tongs. Not just the mechanical beauty of the Rolleis and Hasselblads, the springs and cogs, the snick of a Leica shutter, the clud of a dark-slide locking home.
No; what we are really losing is yet another class of specialness. Historians have a word for it: epiphenomena, the peripheral bits and pieces surrounding the main event. Did Roman togas itch? How often did Erasmus shave and did it hurt? What did William of Normandy smell of? These, the curiousities of texture and experience, are what hold our interest and make life real, and, one by one, they are being homogenised. Our documentation, our re-lived or distant interactions with the world are almost all now mediated through the computer screen: writing letters, watching films, thumbing through photographs: all are now at a distance, through an image on the screen. ...
... a hundred years from now, anyone will be able to pick up a photograph from my old-tech Leica and make it out for what it is. But a 45.6 Mb 300dpi JPEG? Will anything be able to read the file, let alone display it? Here's a chap who has had his first child - hello, Tabitha Millie - and hasn't held her photograph in his hand. They are all on computer, along with everything else. Have them printed, Nick. Write the dates on the back. Stick them in an album. You know; album: a place for epiphenomena, safe from progress.