I Photograph To Remember

hey there this is alex soth and i'm back in my library in saint paul minnesota and last week i posted a video about colors magazine and ever since i've been reflecting on the time period in which colors existed and that was this this funny period in which the the internet existed but it wasn't fast enough to show video and to show high quality photographs so um i remember in in the photography world there was this sense that everything was going to change but it couldn't quite yet and and a magazine like colors uh could kind of exist in that in that little no-man's land and was super creative and had the the energy of this new internet information uh without having it as a much of a distribution platform and as i thought about that time period i was reminded of this this funny little moment uh in photography in which cd-roms were all the rage and um i i tracked down this this old article by a good friend of mine vince leo who was writing about cd-roms in the 90s and and talking about um the kind of fights going on in the photography world and the feeling that cd-roms were going to uh essentially destroy uh the photographic book and and people were getting very defensive about that and fearful of that and as for myself i remember um being pretty excited about this new technology particularly because of uh one cd-rom which is called a photograph to remember by pedro meyer and i want to show that to you here so the cd-rom came in a box like this it was published in 1992 and um it's kind of funny on the box if you look at the specifications it says you need a macintosh with with at least four megabytes of ram uh and uh and so then inside is is the cd and in fact uh within this i are uh very complicated instructions in terms of how to play it um and and in fact um the cd-rom became pretty much unplayable uh just you know within a matter of a few years uh because computers were changing so quickly and whatever format it was created in was no longer readable and so then in in i think 1996 pedro meyer released it on the internet and and i remember um being excited that i could i could watch it again and um and just recently i tracked down pedro meyer's kind of statement when he put it on the internet because um it turns out the publisher of this cd-rom was not was not really happy about that and the publisher had uh had written pedro this this letter and and it said um frankly i'm not especially interested in the transit of i photograph to remember from the cd-rom to the web i consider the move a degradation of the original not the quality of the images or the narration but the experience of the viewer which is now in the thrall of internet connections and bandwidth issues i come from a generation which still likes to possess local copies of its intellectual property i presume that will change in the next few decades but it is the way i feel now and what's what's kind of interesting about that is uh it it didn't really change um and in fact that that that file that pedro meyer put on the internet in the mid 90s was in a format called shockwave and it was only you know a matter of years before that was no longer readable and and so i think it was in it was in around 2006 that he released it again as a downloadable file for ipods and and then people had ipods for a while and then soon that went away and and it disappeared yet again and it was really only in um 2016 in which it it finally emerged again on youtube um sadly it's it's only in the spanish version he recorded two versions um and and i actually really love the english version but with his voice it's quite beautiful but the spanish version does exist and and i want to show you a little clip of it so just the general story is that it's uh it's it's a slideshow very simple black and white slideshow of pictures of pedro meyer's parents and and the story of their aging and eventual death um but the i think that the key uh the key figure in this story is pedro meyer's father who uh was a salesman [Music] and um and and also i was uh was was an enthusiast of um of toys and gadgets and things like that and consequently uh pedro meyer uh is able to talk about the medium of photography itself through his father and through um and through his parents and through their experience so let me just show you a couple clips here [Music] so what i love about this cd-rom is its simplicity uh and and the intimacy of myers voice with these photographs and and of course i love that the the project is about um photography itself to some extent so here's here's another clip right here amiretorno mexico [Music] foreign [Music] is [Music] so what makes this this project work is its um is its emotional directness and and watching it listening to it the technology of the cd-rom or the shockwave or the uh ipod download kind of falls away and and you're just taking in the story but there's a there's a real irony i think in that it's called i photograph to remember and and this and this story keeps disappearing over and over again because of technological changes and in fact when this when this project is written about and discussed it's always done so in terms of the technology uh which is something of a shame and and looking at this now from the perspective of 2021 it's just interesting to see how things played out the fact that um that as of course as overwhelmingly important as the internet is really the photographic culture of fine art photography and kind of narrative storytelling in photography has largely stayed within the realm of of the physical book i remember um giving talks way back when to students and saying you know in the you know in your time your generation someone's gonna make uh the americans but it's going to be uh in some format we don't know of and and really that hasn't happened um it's it's still stayed within uh this traditional form and as i was thinking about this um it occurred to me that uh another book about parents and and about the passage of time and memory uh was published just a year after pedro myers and that is larry sultan's pictures from home so pictures from home for me has to be within my top three all-time favorite photo books it's it's an absolute masterpiece and it's it's a rare example of narrative photography in which uh there's a significant amount of text and it doesn't take away from the power of the photographs and what i think is is quite interesting is noting its similarities to uh peter myers i photographed to remember so as i mentioned the subject matter is um is larry sultan's parents and and in fact his father was a salesman as well and and much of the story has to do with his his work as a salesman and additionally um pictures from home includes photographs of his parents they're actually like film stills of his parents along with modern pictures and i'm really i'm not going to go through this deeply in the same way that i didn't go through pedro meyer's book deeply because the text is so integral and and for me to just flip through the pictures uh will not will not really tell the story of the book you really need to read this text but um sultan was such an incredible writer that the text is is thoroughly enjoyable and and then of course the photographs are incredibly powerful and in much of the text is about photography itself and about representation so sultan's father was skeptical about being portrayed like this as this kind of broken older man because he was he was someone so filled with pride this book was republished a few years ago and after uh on the 25th anniversary and uh it's published by mac and um it's very different design but works incredibly well i often don't like when publishers change the the original design even if the original design is clunky i sometimes like i like to feel that original spirit but um but this was done extraordinarily well and and really keeps the spirit of the original book what i've been thinking about in looking at these is the way in which um the photo book has retained its meaning as a form and and there's a stability to that and and it's something i i really value and i think it's a it's an interesting conversation point um for students and photographers out there to question whether or not it will remain this form in the future i know that a number of publishers mac included invested a lot of resources into ebooks a number of years ago thinking that um that was going to be a powerful form of distribution shipping paper around the world is incredibly expensive and um and after this investment the public just didn't want them um they wanted physical copies of books and and i think that it's it's because um [Music] of the title of pedro meyer's book i photograph to remember there's a desire to possess these memories and and this physical object feels like a way to possess them so something to think about and um i'm probably going to be off often about trying to make my own uh memories to record or something like that so i'm not sure i'll be um posting videos for a little while but uh we'll see so either way i'll see you down the road thanks so much you

Channel: Alec Soth

Views: 16,905

Rating: 4.9739695 out of 5

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Id: zBxbnMcjGiM

Length: 16min 28sec (988 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 30 2021