Saved by Silver
On the Compression of Souls
We rolled our eyes back in the day when all the audiophiles claimed that MP3s were ruining music. We were young and listening to music with low-quality speakers. A bunch of information we couldn’t hear anyway being ditched in favor of portability seemed like a fair trade.
We can afford better speakers now, but our ears got old, so this particular instance doesn’t really matter for us any longer.
This devil’s bargain between accessibility and quality, however, feels more relevant than ever.
We realized this the other day when going through some goofy old family photos from JCPenney. These are not going to win any photography awards, and the chemicals used for the development have aged poorly.
Despite that, the actual image fidelity of a forty year old photo taken at the mall is significantly better than the overwhelming majority of the images we use to document our existence today.
None of the faces in that old photo were smoothed by an algorithm, and the photo itself was crisply resolved at 11×17.
Our world is increasingly mediated through the distorting and compressing eyes of our phones, and not to our benefit. We give up a few pixels here and there for convenience, and suddenly we discover our worlds have shrunk and our memories have been compressed.
In our little effort to hold back the tide, we are delighted to welcome Eternal Springs Studio to this year’s Cryptid Block Party where she will be taking tintype photographs.
It is absurd to post scans of these photos to instagram, as they have a resolution and luminosity that embarrasses the very best digital tool. We’re doing it anyway in the hope that it inspires you to get some real ones taken.
Most of our shop witches are away this weekend, so we will be understaffed. We appreciate your patience, and hope you all enjoy the lunar eclipse on Sunday night.
We can afford better speakers now, but our ears got old, so this particular instance doesn’t really matter for us any longer.
This devil’s bargain between accessibility and quality, however, feels more relevant than ever.
We realized this the other day when going through some goofy old family photos from JCPenney. These are not going to win any photography awards, and the chemicals used for the development have aged poorly.
Despite that, the actual image fidelity of a forty year old photo taken at the mall is significantly better than the overwhelming majority of the images we use to document our existence today.
None of the faces in that old photo were smoothed by an algorithm, and the photo itself was crisply resolved at 11×17.
Our world is increasingly mediated through the distorting and compressing eyes of our phones, and not to our benefit. We give up a few pixels here and there for convenience, and suddenly we discover our worlds have shrunk and our memories have been compressed.
In our little effort to hold back the tide, we are delighted to welcome Eternal Springs Studio to this year’s Cryptid Block Party where she will be taking tintype photographs.
It is absurd to post scans of these photos to instagram, as they have a resolution and luminosity that embarrasses the very best digital tool. We’re doing it anyway in the hope that it inspires you to get some real ones taken.
Most of our shop witches are away this weekend, so we will be understaffed. We appreciate your patience, and hope you all enjoy the lunar eclipse on Sunday night.
