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Long time passing...
Where have all the negatives gone...long time ago.
Where are all the rolls of film...gone to garbage every one.
When will we ever learn?
Pardon the folksinging - I've just been contemplating the sad history of amateur image making over the last 50 years and the propensity of photographers to store their precious negatives, slides, and prints in the photographic equivalent of old council dustbins. ( And I did actually see an entire collection of professional work fill two dustbins a few years ago. A daunting sight. )
Don't think I'm innocent in this - I bought some hanging pages for colour slides a few decades ago and filled an entire filing cabinet. The pages contained glue, earwax, Lewisite, and countless other chemical nasties that caused them to sweat all over the slides. I've recovered most of the damage, but it was a horrifying discovery. The current storage system is much better.
Likewise, I've trusted black and white negatives to plastic sleeves of various sort and have also discovered sticky patches - though not to the extent of the slides.
In the end I have been diligently replacing most of this sort of thing with Glanz filing pages, similar to the ones you see here in the heading image. The shop has carried them for as long as I can remember and the price hasn't changed. They don't seem to change, either, so the physical storage of my work is now pretty safe. It might not be good work, but it's here to stay. Of course this does not correct the exposure errors, processing flaws, and general amateurish nature of my early shots, but the basic information is going to remain.
That's meant to be wry humour - but the longevity of any photographic images - analog or digital - is one of the more important aspects of the art. Few of us have drawn or painted images of ourselves or our friends and relations, but most of us have some sort of photograph of them. We need to preserve these - thus the electronic convolutions of digital storage ( hard drives, RAID arrays, clouds, etc ) and the amazing behaviour of museum and gallery preservationists with archival material. It's a hard and expensive road and I suspect it is dotted with horrible discoveries like those sweating sleeves - even for the experts.
These Glanz pages are four-hole types that can be clipped into folders but it does point out one more point of non-standardisation - how many binders are four-ring? I've got two-ring that take these, but I've seen acres of three-ring tossed from government departments onto council tips.
Thank goodness the digital manufacturers standardised on one form of RAW file for cameras, eh?
