The World's Greatest Photos Could Have Been Lost

I was thinking recently about some of the most extraordinary photos I have seen through the years. Like everyone, I imagine I have seen hundreds of thousands of photos in my life and while the ones of my own family and friends stand out; there are those that represent significant moments in humankind. Some of them are so important, all you need to do to create a vision of them is use a few words to describe them.

The Marines putting the flag onto the ground at Iwo Jima is one such a photo. So is the Hindenburg on fire as it crashes to the ground. What about the street execution of the South Vietnamese man or the young girls running naked away from napalm?
Also included in that list has to be the photo of Lee Harvey Oswald being shot or the remarkable photo of the woman and her two children in the California fields during the Depression. I would definitely include Lyndon Johnson being sworn in on Air Force One with Jacqueline Kennedy looking on, still in the dress she wore all day

I can also think of the young woman on her knees wailing at her friend being shot at Kent State University, perhaps the Wright Brothers in their plane or Anne Frank looking up to her left and certainly the sailor kissing a nurse he didn’t know in Times Square celebrating the end of World War II.

Each of these photos are important points on the map of humanity. They reflect who and what we are and they are visual references of our passage through time. They’re important to all of us and certainly their imagery is treasured.

But besides all of them being cultural moments for us, they have another thing in common. Each of those photographs was shot on film and every single one of them ran the risk of being destroyed, or becoming hopelessly faded through time or discarded accidentally.

It took intervention on someone’s part to bring them to life. If they hadn’t been used in the magazines where we all saw them, what would have happened to them? What happened to the hundreds of thousands of others that weren’t included in magazines because they wouldn’t easily fit the space allotted to them or they weren’t what caught an editor’s eye? Sadly, I have to say, much of that collection of work is probably gone.

If each of those photos; the ones that made the magazine as well as the ones that didn’t, were scanned, digitized and saved to CD or DVD, we’d have all of them. Think of the treasured museum exhibits or online galleries we’d have.

Your photos are as treasured in your life as the photos mentioned above are to our common history. You can avoid the loss of those treasures by having them scanned. Once scanned, you can decide which of your photos sees the light of day and can be shared. If they aren’t scanned and, in fact, remain in a box in the basement, that choice one day may not be yours to make.

Joe Allen
The Scan Zone