Why digital photographs won't be around forever

But Dear Photograph is as well a stark reminder of how threatened this power of photography has become. There is, for openers, the brusque, matter-of-fact, upfront Terms and Conditions of the site. "When you submit your materials," it reads, "you grant dearphotograph.com a non-exclusive, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use the work to be used, copied, sub-licenced, adapted, transmitted, distributed, published, displayed or otherwise pursuant to this agreement our discretion in any and all media". Or, to adapt the famous broken English internet meme, "all your memories are belong to us".

The reason is that during digital research has usually been very good for photography as a mass medium, it has as well made the resulting imagery much more fragile and impermanent. Of the billions of photographs taken every year, the vast majority exist only as digital files on camera memory cards or on the hard drives of PCs and servers in the internet "cloud". In theory - given the right back-up regimes and long-term organisational arrangements - this means that they could, theoretically, endure for a long time. In practice, given the vulnerability of storage innovation, the pace at which computing kit becomes obsolete and storage formats change, and the fact that most people's Facebook accounts die with them, the likelihood is that most of those billions of photographs will not long survive those who took them.

Nan Goldin has said digital innovation has compromised photography: 'The whole issue is so depressing to me.' Do you agree?