Ron Haviv discovered over 200 rolls of his own undeveloped analog film, rolls that had been put aside and then forgotten. When they were processed this year, He had the stunning experience of looking back at moments of history he had never before viewed in photographic form. But this isn’t purely a book of photojournalism, not least because the images are out of date. In addition, Haviv reckoned with the fact that analog film degrades over time—his images evidence light leaks, pooling dye, mold, and other vagaries of time. But far from destroying the photographic work, the “ravages of time” created a hybrid art-journalism. Ultimately, the experience became a meditation on the artifacts we use to record and remember history; how they change over time; how reliant we are on them and how our relationship to images and memories is changing with the shift from analog film to digital.
