The Day the Music Died is Also the Day the Visuals Died

I was sitting around today poking through music and realized it was the 51st anniversary of the day Buddy Holly died. He was lost in that terrible place crash after leaving a concert in Clear Lake Iowa. I was showing my 10-year-old grandson the musical themes that are interconnected, from Holly to the Beatles to Springsteen and beyond.

I explained to him how they called this day “The Day the Music Died.” But as were going through some of that history, I realized that it was the day the visuals died too. From that day on, there would be no more pictures of Buddy Holly taken and we’d have to do with the ones already circulating.

So we looked around a bit and I had a little trouble finding a high quality picture of Holly in a performance. The pictures were grainy, often out of focus, muddied and nearly unwatchable. The same went for the film and video transfers I could find. Compare them with the images of Springsteen or to a lesser extent the Beatles and they don’t hold up.

A big part of the reason is that what we were looking at on the screen were photo scans done long after Buddy Holly died and they were already in the midst of what I call “The Big Fade.” The originals might not have been stored safely and, after decades, were brought out and someone finally had the good sense to scan them. But they had already lost so much of their quality. To my grandson, the photos of this rock and roll pioneer were practically pre-historic.

Imagine, if you will, if that’s the quality of photos of a legend--because they weren’t scanned and preserved--what chance do the photos of ordinary people have of lasting? Well, the answer is, about the same—or worse.

If the technology was there to scan those photos not long after they were taken, preserving them at that moment with minimal loss of quality, he wouldn’t look so, well, historic. He’d look as vibrant and alive as the moment the photo was taken and he would be preserved that way for generations.

The fact that some pictures make it through the decades undamaged while others take an awful beating is reason enough to think about scanning your photos. I don’t want someone a generation or two behind me looking at pictures of John Lennon or my Aunt Pauline or my elementary school principal and thinking about them the same way I think of pictures of say, Woodrow Wilson.

If you have photos stored somewhere, consider digitizing them. They will be captured they way they are, with a minimal amount of degradation and can be output to DVD to be preserved for half a century or more.

When we lose someone, famous or anonymous, close to us or unknown to us, we lose the ability to photograph or videotape him or her. S o all we will have is what is already behind them. By keeping those images safe, they can last for generations or more. They will be immortalized for us as if it were the day they were taken and not as a footnote to our family history.

Joe Allen

The Scan Zone