It’s strange, this relationship with our individual, intensely personal archives of photos. We store our memories outside of ourselves, in the seemingly ephemeral “cloud” which is, in reality, just a lot of long hallways in vast server farms. Reliant on BigTech, we pay in perpetuity to access a life that is, in turn, made perpetual. This picture of when I ripped my jeans by banging up cartoonishly against a mysterious thigh-high metal rod emerging from the sidewalk near Grand Army Plaza will live on in iPhone Photos, always ready to re-pixelate on demand, long after the green-purple bruise on my leg has faded.
I take pictures. Apple encrypts the pictures. Thank you Apple. Apple stores the encryption keys and the photo’s metadata on their own servers, in Reno or North Carolina or Oregon or California or Denmark or China, whichever’s closest. Thank you Apple. Apple then cuts my file into chunks and sends them to Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud Platform to store. Thank you Amazon and Google. If I exceed Apple’s data limit, I will switch to storing directly on a third party, most likely Apple and Google. Amazon and Google work on constructing more data centers, anywhere they can find cheap land and cheap energy, turning well water brown and promising jobs that never appear to struggling communities (not to mention new AI centers literally poisoning the air in a predominately Black community in Memphis) (source, source, source).
I feel a compulsive impulse to capture a moment by taking a photo. I can’t risk forgetting the bizarre salad I made for myself one night, or what it felt like to walk around at night on a Thursday on my way to a show feeling invincibly adult. I couldn’t risk not capturing the strangeness of the advertisements for an eyelash extension business across the street, which reminded me of an exhibition I had just seen as well as a contemporary Dr. T.J. Eckleburg.
I started journaling in 2020. Every night for five years, with rare skips, I have written down what I have done that day and any emotions I might be having. This impulse to purge a day from myself and, in the process, record it for posterity is something that I often question. I am suspicious of my own inclination to save. I feel it too deeply. Who am I doing this for?
With a stubborn refusal to pay for storage that was initially free, the summer after freshman year of college I decided that I would take all of my photos from Google Photos, download them to my computer, and convert them to physical media. This painstaking process resulted in two and a half photo albums which sit at the bottom of my bookcase in my childhood home, which I peruse along with my old diaries once every couple of months. I usually have to wrench myself away from this activity, feeling nauseous from the overwhelming submersion in the insecurities and bizarre preoccupations of my past. Thank God I’m not that fucked-up person with a fucked-up haircut anymore, I think, and leave the room to cut my bangs even shorter while sending another blissfully self-centered text to a friend.
Now, three years later, my Photos app bulges again. More immediately accessible than the photo albums and diaries in a house four hours away, the app has once again become compelling as telling the story of my life (at least my life over the past three years). Littered with flyers and other have-to-remember-this-later detritus, the photos of dinners and people and the world are what I go to to remember what my life was like, or at least looked like, at a given time. I met someone recently who wrote a thesis about how we only gain a concrete understanding of our life when someone else tells us about it. Maybe photos provide that reflection back to me.
Daily life is mediated by the banal logistics of systems of power. Mediated by the constrictions and design layouts of apps: photos auto-corrected by Apple to smoothly generic lighting and grain, fights happening through blue bubbles, the balance in my bank app ticking down and down with a discouraging minus sign.
When my grandmother died, me and my sister and I had already spent the past couple of days keeping vigil at her house in Rhode Island. We had said our goodbyes to her, a strange and horrible and beautiful process, and returned to school. The world was better with Katrina Avery in it. Then my mother FaceTimed me from Rhode Island, and showed me her yellowing body through the small rectangular screen.
Despite how often we are warned about our everlasting digital footprint, it is also important to remember that data, like human beings, can die. In the book “Death Design Data,” there’s an excellent interview of the designer Thomas Walskaar, who wrote an ethnography of testimonies in internet forums of stories of lost data. Walskaar writes: “I understand how emotionally connected one can be to their files…The device was an extension of themselves, and when it dies, a part of them dies as well.”
“The tech industry consistently over promises and under delivers in everything they do in this matter,” he warns, and companies are often bought out or their business models shift, leading to data loss. Even devices like hard drives, “a spinning disk encased in metal, rotating between 5400 and 7200 revolutions per minute” have a lifespan of about four years. Walskaar advocates a caretaking approach, emphasizing data quality over quantity: “I think as a society, we need to become more aware. We need to recognize that we take photos incessantly, and while they take up space, not all of them are necessary. It takes effort to determine what you truly want to save. … I essentially act as an admin for my own data, maintaining and performing upkeep. I am a gardener for my own data. If I don’t take care of it or I ignore it, it will die in the end.”
I’m really interested in this idea of caretaking. If I don’t take care of it or if I ignore it, it will die in the end. It takes an extreme proactivity, effort, and executive function to become a gardener of your own data. The only person I know who effectively does so is my mother, and I feel a real sense of failure and overwhelm when I think about the sheer amount of work that it will require when I have to (I must admit) start keeping track of my own dentist files. Skills that have gone soft and sensitive like a rotting cavity on a hard white tooth by my lifestyle, which is blasting my mind with short-form content for hours a day.
My own gardening efforts have been haphazard. The lack of access to my college email’s Google Drive, cut off in mid-September, prompted another storage crisis for me, and I tried to download all of the material in my email and drive to my computer. This proved a surprisingly hard and lengthy process, and despite the promises of Google TakeOut, I ended up with a half-downloaded drive and some email settings in a zip file. I then tried to doctor the half-downloaded material, adding and rearranging it. Then I realized that I could share the drive, and simply copy over the material of the original into my current Google Drive. I went through each folder and copied all of the material into a corresponding folder, organizing as I went. This means I now have a second bastardized version of my Google drive, and am well on my way to ship-of-Theseus-ing every Google Doc I’ve worked on. Fighting for my life to stay at 99% capacity.
My mother also regularly prunes her photos, often immediately deleting all but the best take of a picture, which means she keeps an enviably meaningful and sparse collection. Elimination of detritus and bloated files can be a protective act of care for your own data, both decreasing what you send to those long hot-and-cold server hallways and making it easier for what you want to live on to actually live on. But even when I went through all of my photos in making those photo albums three years ago, I couldn’t bear to delete those photos of my receipts or all of the alternative angles of a selfie. What I didn’t print out at the CVS kiosk now lives in organized folders on a hard drive.
Why can’t I delete? Why am I so attached to my own Self represented in this way? I’ve been reading Simone Weil (Gravity and Grace, specifically) and can now diagnose myself with an inability to accept death. “May God grant me to become nothing,” she wrote. For Weil, the self is “only the shadow which sin and error cast by stopping the light of God, and I take this shadow for a meaning.” The self blocks God from the world, like an “unwelcome third who is with two betrothed lovers and ought to go away so that they can really be together.” We must renounce the self by dying a mini-death in order to “liberate a tied-up energy.” I suspect that Weil would not have a storage problem in her photos app if she lived now. Could deleting photos, including meaningful ones, be that mini-death? Could it be an act of “accept[ing] the past without asking for future compensation”? Of “accept[ing] death,” of “reduc[ing] ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time — that is to say, nothing”?
Like, probably. But mass deletion of photos — which feels like to me to be the nuclear option — might not be the only other way out besides accumulation. In the past couple of months, I experienced two artworks that got me thinking about phone photos critically and ultimately led to this blog post.
In May, just before graduating, I saw an exhibit at the Mass MOCA called “The Archive of Lost Memories” two days in a row. The artist Randi Malkin Steinberger covered the inside of this lofty, barn-like building with photographs, mainly stern vintage portraits that she sorted and manipulated. The part of the exhibit I found most interesting, though, was “Everyday Phone Calls,” (2016 - ongoing) in which she took a screenshot every time she had a new entry in her log of FaceTime calls. She printed them all out and then pasted them together in rows and columns on the high-ceilinged walls, capturing the rotating logs themselves but also snapshots of her face, room clutter, and her other artwork. The Mass MoCA catalog describes the piece as “recalling the warp and weft of textiles,” which I think captures something about how the repetition of these moments over time (as in continually opening the FaceTime app) was converted into repetition in physical space.
One month later, in the summer’s-winter of late June in Canberra, Australia, the artist and researcher Yann Seznec presented “The Memory Cloud.” In this project, he extracted the audio out of every video in his personal cloud library and used this collection as a basis for a granular synthesizer. Yann experienced deep friction at every step: in transferring the photos to his computer, in writing the script to extract the audio, in outputting the audio to the synth. Apple is extremely resistant to users using their own files outside of the Apple system.
In Canberra, that strange government town plastered with posters protesting kangaroo road deaths, I sat in the audience on the plush red chairs and listened to Seznec speak. I had just presented myself, and I thought that the Memory Cloud was the coolest thing I had seen from the whole conference. Both Seznec and Steinberger had pushed past the frictions of Apple, the pains of airdropping or emailing vast quantities of files, converting from HEIC to JPG or whatever needed to be done, to make their static libraries into something with more possibility, more meaning. Seznec’s videos are literally turned into an instrument, the sounds manipulated and toyed with into new art, while Steinberger has amassed all of these individual moments and memories into one warping and weaving monument.
Thinking about pushing past the structures of data ownership set up by Apple etc has brought up another question: could the idea of caring for data transcend the atomization of individual experiences on individual devices? But also: must we all have our own gardens? Through these vast server farms, Big Tech has created a sort of perverted communality to our data storage: up and down the hot and cold aisles, your data mingles with mine. But we’re already tied together, more than that. Your face shows up in my pictures. My face appears in your camera roll. Your texts to me are my texts to you.
In my case, this tie is quite literal. After having logged into my sister’s iPad with my AppleID, some of our photo data got confused, and when I logged into a new phone in September, some of her photos from years ago appeared on my device. It took me a while to realize this, after I did, I tried to avoid them: there is something so intimate and vulnerable about photos, no matter how innocent, appearing in someone else’s space without your having sent them. But what if that intimacy and vulnerability could be used, without sacrificing privacy, to expand the project of data gardening? First of all, could we support the fight against the encroachment of data centers? Then, could we archive our Signal chats in a safe way? Could my data live on your hard drive? Could you share your password with me so I can steward your data when you pass?
What happens if we think of the act of taking and maintaining our everyday photos as a vow to ourselves and each other? In a photo-app landscape of compulsion, excess, and exploitation of resources and people, I see a little sliver of what it might be like to operate with care.
(ex. this event by a hackerspace in Atlanta)
thank you zoe, claire, and poppy for editing!!
go home