Richard links to slideshow of photographs depicting the decline of fashion photography.#

Richard Tallent on art preservation.#

Thought: if every pot, every vase, every painting, every carved stone, every ruin of every ancient civilization survived until today, how much would we cherish the ones we have now? Why do we bestow such honor upon them? In most cases, it is not because of their intrinsic artistic value: they were common and ordinary in their own time. We do not value them for their durable construction: their survival is more often a case of chance than designed longevity, and greater works have certainly perished under different conditions. No, they are honored because they among the few tenuous links we have to their creators.

To bestow such honor on common items of our own generation is ludicrous. Time and fate must test them first. If a common spray-painted frog on a wall survives another century through naught but happenstance, then we might give it some place of honor as a link to our past, a relic that survived its season by nothing worthy within itself. But to debate and protest its destruction in the normal course of events is as silly as going to the dump and digging through the trash for a photograph in yesterday's paper.