OpinionJournalp- Film is dying

OpinionJournal - Leisure & Arts: "The sentimentalist in me wants this to end, everyone to go back to film, and to hell with Photoshop. The practical person in me asks, where would I set up a darkroom these days? And when would I use it? Besides, notes Mark Federman, who teaches at the University of Toronto's McLuhan Program, there's no point in labeling a change such as film-to-digital as 'bad' or 'good.' It's just a change.

Which isn't to say this particular change is without damaging impacts, despite digital's obvious win in the marketplace. Mr. Federman, who thinks often about how societies 'remember,' sees digital photography as a disaster for historians. People delete pictures from their cameras' memory cards. Hard drives crash. PCs end up in the dump, photos still on board. And CDs full of pictures will become unreadable when their surfaces deteriorate (you heard that right--CDs are incredibly unstable). With all that, says Mr. Federman, we're on the verge of losing billions of pictures. 'We will not have a record of the individual stories that are told by families from one generation to another through pictures,' Mr. Federman says. 'That is a wealth of human history that will simply be lost.'

Look at it another way: When survivors of Hurricane Katrina returned to their devastated homes in New Orleans or Mississippi, almost without fail they sought family photographs--that one tangible link with their past. Today we're ensuring that in the future those photographs won't even exist. True, prints made from digital photos can now last as long as their film equivalent, but that's still only a few decades compared with the hundreds of years a black-and-white negative might last.

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