New Featured Collection & Blog: FORMAT 19 FOREVER//NOW & PCN Director Paul Herrmann on digital legacy

To coincide with this month's Featured Collection of images from FORMAT19 FOREVER//NOW, our members' blogpost this month features a talk given by our director, Paul Herrmann, at this year's festival in Derby. Paul discusses how, through the work of the PCN, some worrying patterns about the the issues people and organisations were facing specifically about digital work have begun to emerge:

"The early days of digital promised something amazing: using the power of the link, no less than an interconnected and interwoven visual story of our era; the idea of the photograph as a node in a living network. But the reality, and the early conclusion of our research, based on interviews and surveys, is that that might not happen. If we do nothing, we will get a very skewed digital legacy. How will we access today’s born-digital photography in 100 years’ time?
 
I’m going to talk about three areas - personal photography; small private archives belonging to photographers, galleries and SMEs, and larger public collections. They have different but overlapping problems. And I’ll finish with a few examples of where the problems are being tackled, and some suggestions...."

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