David understands what I was talking about. Edit and print all you want, but isn’t it nice to have a solid version of the original image; a substrate that was actually touched by the very light that “wrote” the subject? To me, this is one of the best things about film.

I might suffer from a bit of romanticism, but destroying negatives is like scanning a loved one’s hand written letter, changing the font, adding a few words, saving it all to disc and then destroying the original with gunfire. I would only do that to a letter from Visa. In that case I would use a 50 cal.

As has been said, I am skeptical of digital as an archival medium. I really worry about how our current culture will be remembered visually 100-200 years in the future. I think this prove to be the final irony as technology marches on. I think negatives stand a much better chance.

I also agree with the comment above about the veracity of the negative. It is not an issue of editing, but of correspondence. All truth is relative, since it is part of a human abstract framework. But whether someone or something existed, or looked a certain way, or suffered a particular travail is not. The meaning of those events, especially from the perspective of art, is highly subjective, and, yes, various types of editing can effect the meaning, but this a different argument. Check out Errol Morris’ thoughts on the subject at his blog at the NY Times: http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/

This is relevant because we are living in a time when photographic deceit is gradually becoming an accepted norm by an increasingly credulous public.

So,in short, I think retaining the negatives is important, now more than ever.

I like the idea that a negative is solid evidence that a unique or even strange event was not Photoshopped, even if I am the only one who needs such proof when I’m old and senile.

I keep my personal images in a different archive from my artworks and my wife would kill me if she thought I was destroying our family negatives as I agree they are different… now if I could just convince her to organize them!!!

I’m not a professional photographer but i’m just merely an enthusiast that takes pictures of everything and anything that captures my eyes like family events or just people walking.
With that in mind, I like to keep my negatives with me even if I know 30 years from now my work will not have any value similar to that of Ansel Adams or HCB.

I shoot for personal reasons with film and I have it scanned so that family and friends can see it through social networking sites. Now if my mother wants some of the pictures I’ve taken I will give it to her to have it printed at a local lab.

I guess since my approach to photography is more personal, I like to keep the work as mine that is why I am very hesitant to throw away the negatives even if the images there are really crap.

Right now, I might concentrate on black and white and try developing my own negatives and in the future also adopt the one print policy that you have

Have A Good One
- A.g.

On archival storage – I just printed 194 small images from December 2004 for my wife and she asked me to make her a CD of the images. I’mconvinced that that isless archival than the pair of external HDDs they currently reside on and that they are less archival than the box of prints I keep of anything that interests me. Digital has made things harder as it’s easier to make more exposures that we are told should be DAMed (!) and archived etc. Life is just too short. My box of prints is fine for me.

Mike