Leading industrial Countries sign Florence Declaration

FLORENCE, ITALY – The culture ministers of the leading industrial economies signed the Florence Declaration during the G7 Culture summit, committing them to fight the looting, trafficking and destruction of heritage.

Against the background of the ongoing debate on the complete digitization of photo archives and the frequent demands thus being made for the gradual winding up of photo archives and their conversion into digital and internet searchable forms, the Florence Declaration supports the view that, while the digitization of photographic collections is undoubtedly an aim worth pursuing, digital photos can only in part replace the original photographic print.

Digital archives cannot therefore entirely take over the task of analogue archives. For technologies not only condition the methods of transmission, conservation and use of documents, but also shape their content. An analogue photo and its digital reproduction should therefore be considered two distinct objects.

A particular significance is attributed in the Florence Declaration to the character of analogue photos as material objects. Each analogue photo is thus said to possess a biography of its own that is expressed in various aspects such as the moment of its production, the technology used, the aim of its production, and its incorporation in the context of a particular archive and its system.

While internet access is ideally independent of place and time, it also limits access to a single component of the photographic object: the digitalized image. Since digitization projects are necessarily bound up with a selection of particular aspects of the material, a wholly digitalized “capture” of the object with all its qualities would be impossible.

The Florence Declaration further points out the inherent obsolescence and instability of the digital format itself: so far little reliable information is available on whether the long-term archiving of digital information is viable and how far online databases and internet structures can be maintained in the long run.