Freeing photography from the digital jailhouse

You should print your pretty pictures.

Dec 06, 2024

If I open Lightroom on my computer, where I manage most of my artistic digital workflow, I can see almost every photo I’ve taken using a camera. This collection represents the entirety of my serious efforts in photography over the last five years. There’s also what I call non-serious photography in there from the fifteen years before that.

Just in years alone, it sounds a bit overwhelming. There are two whole decades of my photos in the cloud!

That’s 25,402 photos (of which 4,131 are picks) in all.

So what do I do with these 4,131 keepers?

I guess I would post them on Instagram. Or, I could shovel them into an online portfolio. And, yeah, there’s probably one or two more online photo platforms where these could live. I do all of these to some extent, but something about it bothers me.

If this is all the effort I invest in the process of sharing, I feel like I am actually doing very little to give these photographs their due. That’s because, all of the first interactions people will have with those photographs will occur through a screen. Existing like this, they will never breathe real air.

Can your photos breathe?

What about you? If you opened your Photos app on your phone right now to see how many photos you have, what would that number say?

Of the total amount, there is a not-insignificant number of photographs which will likely have personal and sentimental value. Photos of friends, family, and partner — all these exist on my phone too.

But what ultimately happens to all these photos? If you’re anything like most people, they will all suffer the same fate.

You’ll upload to Instagram. They’ll backup to iCloud. Maybe you will make a shared album after a special occasion. They will be one double-tap on Instagram away from being forgotten; forever trapped in some form of digital purgatory.

The chances are high that they will just exist somewhere in-between the moment they were made and the world they were destined to live in — our very own.

Viewing a richly-textured, new print through a magnifying lens

The value of an image

I know I am mixing purposes here a little bit, but hear me out.

If we as individuals assign some type of aesthetic or sentimental value to our photographs, those images deserve to be real. They should exist in the same world as the individuals that are depicted inside the frame.

A photograph could be something that we see and then forget as we scroll onward. Or, it can be something present; a frozen moment of significance present in our three-dimensional world. The paper, the mat, the frame and the glass provide images a gravity that the digital world just cannot supply.

The photographs that give us and make us feel so much should not remain jailed in our mobile phones; much less the internet platforms of corporate tech giants.

A challenge for you

If you are one of the few who already habitually prints photographs and plasters them to your fridge, frames and hangs them, or mails them to friends, then you’ve been nodding this entire time.

If you aren’t, then I want you to find a favourite photo of yours from recent time and print it out. Spend a couple of bucks at a drugstore or upload and order it online. And hey, if you’re feeling adventurous, I want you to print even more.

Because I can’t describe to you what it is to hold a moment in your hands if you never do it. Printing was once a necessity for us to see our photographs. Now, it is just a tradition and very much an exception to the rule.

Whether you’re an artist or not, print the moments you captured best.

They deserve it.