HARD COPY

Digital photographs
Dimensions variable
Series of 12 photographs
2014-2020

Hard Copy is a series of photographs of recordable media collections that friends and neighbors store in their homes, despite the face that they will never access them again due to obsolescence. The photographs investigate the relationships we have with recordable media, and how the phenomenon of hoarding old recordable media relates to media storage in the digital age. We also encode our recordings with our identity. These recordings, like obsolete VHS tapes and floppy disks, become extensions of our selves, appendages that we cannot cut off. Even if we can never watch or hear them again due to obsolescence, they are encoded with our histories, signifying who were are, or who we were at the moment that recording was made. Very often, we hang on to old media with the intention of upgrading the recordings to newer media formats, but more often than not, obsolete media lingers in the attic until the original owner passes away, leaving others to sort through the hoarded memories of someone else.