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Defining the value of something

An interesting post at The Online Photographer:

The Trough of No Value

Click for full-size.

I find this a particularly poignant picture. It's preserved in the George Grantham Bain Collection at the Library of Congress; I found it on page five of Michael L. Carlebach's excellent American Photojournalism Comes of Age (one of my favorite books about photography, by the way).

It shows the photography staff of the newspaper The New York World in 1909. Or at least we can assume the man on the left and the man on the stairs are photographers, since they're shown with cameras. I direct your attention, as Michael Carlebach does, to the wall at the back of the room that also displays the clock. Know what those are? They're negatives�the newspaper's photographic archive. The hundreds of cases you see there in neatly-shelved rows contained thousands of negatives of newsworthy events, people, and places, collected at considerable expense by the paper and with great labor and sometimes risk by the men in the picture and their cohorts.

When the newspaper folded, all those negatives were thrown away.

What follows is an interesting meditation on value and Mike (the author) introduces the concept of the The Trough of No Value: A very clear way to express this idea. Posted by DaveH at February 7, 2009 7:43 PM