Photography is... Hoarding: Navigating the endless flood of digital images

Foam joins forces with digital culture platform The Hmm for a series of online talks. In Photography is..., we investigate how internet culture permeates and alters different layers of photography—extending the photographic field exponentially. How does our relationship with the photographic image shift and change to the internet's cultural and technological developments?

In 2024, an estimated 1.94 trillion photos will be taken worldwide, with 5.3 billion photos captured daily, or 61,400 per second. With approximately 14.3 trillion photos in existence, and 14 billion images shared daily on social media, it seems like we have a hoarding problem. We often forget that behind the immaterial metaphors of ‘the cloud’ are real, physical technologies. The storage of these vast amounts of data requires extensive energy and infrastructure, contributing to carbon emissions while we mindlessly save every moment from our phones to the cloud.

Yet, this abundance of digital imagery also serves a vital social purpose. Photographs have become powerful tools for social justice, serving as a witness of human rights abuses and environmental crises. Activists and citizen journalists wield their cameras to document injustices and share vital information online, often putting their safety on the line in the process. The act of saving and sharing these images, in the face of censorship or erasures, amplifies voices and preserves important narratives that might otherwise be silenced.

This duality raises pressing questions: What is the value of a single photograph in a flood of digital images? How do we balance the need to document significant events with the environmental impact of our digital habits? How will we store and preserve these large quantities of visual data?

Speakers include: Anouk Kruithof, Oscar Talbot and Razan AlSalah