Some thoughts on Archives, Truth, and Time.
I think the first time I heard the term Archive, it was in reference to The National Archives in Washington DC. I was a teenager at the time and for a long time I thought archives were places full of documents and papers. I never imagined that I would one day manage a massive archive of my own.
Along with photography, it has been the single most time consuming element of my life. I have been working on it in earnest since about 1993, and even if I were to live another hundred years, I don’t imagine I would ever finish updating and refining it. I don’t know if it may even become futile at some point in the future, not the effort, but the thing itself, and all that is in it. We are inundated with reports and claims that we are inundated with images.
The Internet itself is an archive, the most gargantuan of all archives, and it is growing exponentially by the millisecond. It contains a mind boggling amount of information, both useful and useless, and it is searchable. But how do we differentiate the latter from the former? And how much of it is real as opposed to fiction or outright malicious lies? The skills of word and image manipulators have become a real danger to the real truth. It is becoming difficult to identify what is real and what is not, and it is not simply in the content of the image, but also in any contiguous information in the form of captions, descriptions, and other metadata, including EXIF data. This is by no means a new phenomenon, for any form of human documentation has had its flaws in recording and/or portraying the truth since the beginning of the practice, or the beginning of politics, whichever came first.
On Facebook, most people neglect to identify the place and time of the photographs posted, or often misrepresent the information, either intentionally or erroneously. My teenage niece claims that she resides a continent away from her actual home, simply because her parents want to protect her from any predators, as she is prone to participate in the obligatory practice of posting selfies. The way Tumblr is constructed, most images have a life of a few hours if not minutes, as they are replaced by new postings. There is so much traffic of blogging and re-blogging that I wonder if anyone has the time to even click on the Archive buttons of any of the Tumblr blogs. In fact Tumblr is proud to make the following claim through a welcome message once you sign up for a new blog:
They don’t even know how to spell Number!! In addition to wasting my time on Tumblr and on Facebook, I may also be wasting time looking for images in my archive to post on Facebook and Tumblr. But such is the price of remaining current. Perhaps it will ward off dementia.
For several years, I was a member of the Arab Image Foundation, an archive of vintage photography from the Middle East. As much as an effort can be made, it is impossible to attribute all the photographs in the archive to their proper authors, or to the dates when or places where they were taken. In the absence of concrete data, it is easy to make ‘educated guesses.’ On the other hand, even with precise mechanisms such as EXIF data recorded by a digital camera at the time of capture, if the camera was not properly set, or if the time settings have drifted by even one or two seconds, then what should be reliable information is already false.
How important is this concern for precision, accuracy, and fact? Evidently, in most cases, it is not. In my own archive some photographs are given an approximate time, as in i.e. “circa 1997” versus others where after a photo shoot, I actually photograph the time on the computer monitor with the same camera from a reliable source, such as the US Naval Observatory.
Once I compare the time in the digital image with the EXIF data of same image, I then compensate for the difference using a simple utility to reset the time on all the photographs taken in the last cycle.
As I am not diligent about this all the time, the reliability factor for the whole archive is thus reduced. This may well be forgivable for most if not all my photographs, as they are meant to be Art and not Science; but it could be a huge liability in high security or scientific applications, particularly in places like Geneva, or to be more specific CERN, or to be more exact:
Ultra Precise timing is of the utmost importance in places like CERN. It could mean the life or death of the Universe. According to one article, this one from TIME itself:
The universe was first endangered back in September, when a group of CERN physicists fired a swarm of neutrinos — ghostly particles that don’t give a fig about objects in their path—through a mountain...
Evidently, the 7.5 billion Euro Large Hadron Collider’s credibility, and that of Albert Einstein, the father of physics himself, were threatened by a mere malfunctioning loose fiber optic cable. It took twelve months of international head-scratching and many more neutrino accelerations to discover and prove the error of 60.7 nanoseconds.
I have become mistrustful of even what should be considered among the most trustworthy newspapers in the world, The New York Times, whose slogan “All the News That’s Fit to Print” from 1897 has been replaced with the following on their digital masthead:
So mistrustful of any “truth” have I become, that I even have come up with the idea that the whole Snowden episode itself is a fabrication. That is Edward Snowden, and not Snowden, the band. That in fact, Edward Snowden is a clever creation of any one of several TLA’s (Three Letter Acronyms) dedicated to the security of the United States - a mere actor who has succeeded in disseminating false, or God Forbid, sometime inaccurate classified information to mislead the rest of the world. The World being anyone besides himself and a handful of other folk, if that many, or even if he himself knows about it. I am also wondering if the country formerly of a four letter acronym is in on it, and by country I mean at least one other person, if not a handful.
For a moment I wasn’t sure if I should use the word distrust or mistrust, and I Googled: mistrust vs distrust. On top of the page I was informed that I was unjokingly “chosen”
One thing I am sure of now, that the time is approximately 03:31 Eastern Daylight Savings time and it’s time for the Dreaming.