The Artifact

Ever since the Kindle came onto the market I have been worried about the loss of the artifact. To be fair, I should have been already, with digital photo files overtaking the average household computer in place of plastic sleeved albums and hastily labeled boxes full of mismatched negatives and one hour photo prints. Something about the kindle made me worry for the artifacts associated with the creative act of writing. I look upon my bookshelves as ever changing sculptures of varying textures and colors and have, in my whole life, given away only a handful of books. (Not including those University Texts that I sold back to the bookstores at the end of the semester in the hopes of funding a nice dinner out or another months rent on a storage unit.)

A few months ago I started to understand the benefit of the Kindle. My sister, who appreciates the written word far more than I and has thusly collected a library that oppresses the small condo she shares with her husband and two cats, demonstrated the balance between maintaining the artifact and maintaining the art. There are books, she explains, that you should keep on hand. They are either sentimental or contain some specific purpose, such as sewing diagrams or imagery, that cannot be appropriately duplicated by the Kindle. There are still books that she wants to lay on a table and hold open at the crease with a weighted tape dispenser. Beyond that, however, everything that she can get on a Kindle, she does, and her walls have been unburdened of their over cluttered and sagging bookshelves and replaced with squares of paint color to be tested on the new space revealed.

I realized that I am surrounded by Artifact books. It's why I am reserved about the Kindle, even anachronistic. My books primarily have images. Books patiently printed with precise color plates from the likes of Leibowitz or Salgado. The Revelations of Arbus. The Americans of Frank. The artifact of these books, often printed under the careful supervision of the originating artists themselves. Seeing an image in print, be it on the wall at a gallery, in a quality book, or even on the pages of an art magazine, is an entirely different experience than seeing a low resolution image beamed to your optic nerves from an illuminated screen.

I often wonder how many family generations will be visually lost due to catastrophic hard drive failure. How many people take the time to print out their favorite images anymore? How many rely on the albums provided by Flickr or Picasa as opposed to the leather-bound tome on the coffee table? It might not be an issue now, it might not ever be. I may be completely off base. But it seems as though, at some point in time, the orphaned images, whether or not they are maintained in the protected servers of the world, will lose their identities. What images will we show our children and grandchildren in our sunset years? Where will the artifacts be? Or will we remember ourselves differently in the future and the artifact be a thing of the past, considered additional clutter from a wasteful time in human history?

All I know for certain is that I intend to continue taking images and printing them.