Photo Archives VIII. The Digital Photo Archive, eikones, Basel
The current ‘archival moment’ (Daston 2017) is characterised by the unprecedented online access to visual material, but also by deep concerns about loss of information. Scholars are confronted with the limitless production and circulation of (sometimes self-produced) digital images, as well as with the fragility of aggregated image clusters. Digitisation and digital photography are established practices, and numerous methods and approaches to the storage and retrieval, indexing, interoperability and sustainability of digital image collections have been tested, debated, applied, expanded, questioned and discarded.
These technological developments mean that more and more people all over the world are involved in creating, manipulating and collecting images. Images and metadata are copied, scraped, aggregated and rearranged in feeds, clusters and databases, both for commercial or scientific purposes. Moreover, big visual data serve as the basis for developing computer vision techniques. While these multifaceted collections evade canonical notions of the archive, archival structures and practices have become a nexus of the post-digital condition.
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