Fine art photographer Ed Burtynsky dropped by the other day and had a great chat with Nora about preserving our photographs for the future.
Ed talked about his proposal for “The Gallery of the Long Now.” It would compliment the Clock of the Long Now project, now underway. The idea for the clock was hatched over 20 years ago and the goal is to build a clock that can run–by itself–for 10,000 years. The plan is for it be housed in a mountain, protected from the elements.
When Ed found out about the clock, he thought it could be a sort of pilgrimage site and that a gallery would be a great addition.
Nora and Ed chatted about the proposed gallery, how you can make photographs last for 10,000 years and what the idea of “enduring quality” means in the digital age. He also warns against keeping all your photos in digital form and welcomes the return of printed photographs.
A shorter version of the interview will air on the Sept 10 and 13 episode of Spark, but you can watch the whole interview below.
Audio-only
If you’d prefer an audio-only version, you can listen to the whole interview in the player below or download the MP3.
Play audio:
The idea of 10,000 year old imagines is not unique in world. Go to Kakadu National Park in Australia and you find artwork and imagines up to 25,000 years old and more. These acted as guide posts, teaching themes, locations of food, leadership lessons, and so on for the aboriginals. Australia is fortunately to have a climate that is good to the natural materials used in the imagines and it has had not an ice age like North America. I saw many pictures of animals, people and everyday life that were thousands of years old.
On the other hand, we recently celebrated my mother’s 80th birthday complete with a lot of old and grainy photographs which have survived (unlike a batch of digital photos I had from Australia which were lost when I spilled my coffee on my computer!)
Interesting interview. However I was left with a question that may well be a topic for another episode of Spark. What about time itself. In 10000 years will time as we know it now be altered? Really when one thinks about time in particular hours minutes and seconds we have not seen much change with the exception of time in sports which goes to a deeper depth, 10ths of seconds. But the interesting question is what will time look like in the future>
@Cliff,
Whoa, head trip! That is really interesting to contemplate. Or what if theoretical physics completely changes our sense of time? There’s a great IDEAS doc about researchers at Oxford challenging our ideas of time. Audio is here:
http://www.cbc.ca/ideas/features/living-on-oxford-time/index.html