Notecard: Photographs and permanence

The way I learned to think of the medium of photography was that the whole point of taking a picture was to preserve a moment. So, throwing away a negative? I can’t conceive of it. Even damaged negatives, ones with giant light leaks, I don’t throw away. I recently read The Night Albums by Kate Palmer Albers, and learned that in the very beginnings of photography, for the first twenty years or so, they struggled to make photographs permanent. Once that was achieved, permanence became the point, but it doesn’t have to be that way. 

- from Photographic Neuroses, a review of Alec Soth's A Pound of Pictures on The Paris Review

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