Transcript of Martha Carney of BBC Radio’s Today Show, Interviewing Isabelle Dervaux, Family Photo Curator and Geoff Dyer, Author, on the the explosion of Digital Photography and what it says about who we are. Original broadcast, April 23rd 2021.

Martha Carney BBC
It's six o'clock on Friday, the 23rd of April. Good morning, this is today with Nick Robinson and Martha Carney, and we're going to look now digital photographs, I don't know about you Nick, but my phones my iPhone, everything is bursting with photographs I don't have a clue what to do with.

Nick Robinson BBC
The ones that you think you should delete but never quite get round to do.

Martha Carney BBC
Laughter. Exactly, exactly. All of those. Well, this is where a woman called Isabel Dervaux can help. Those people employ her to sort through their photos, I've been talking to her and the writer Geoff Dyer whose book Seesaw is a series of essays about photographs and I began by asking is about what exactly is a digital photo curator.

Isabelle Dervaux
We are now in a digital era, and we have a phone, we have a camera in our pocket, and we photograph everything. So, at some point we feel like, people call me and they say, I have too many photos I don't know what to do, help me. Usually, it's part organizing, and what I like to do the most is to, let's find the best picture that's gonna make you smile that you want to pass on that you want to share, and that your children are going to be happy to see in 20 years.

MC BBC
That's such a good way of putting it, because often the photographs we have don't make us smile they can feel like a burden hanging over our head, I looked up on my phone and since 2010 I've got more than seven and a half thousand photos that I really don't know what to do with,

ID
You can have a hundred thousand photos on your phone, totally fine, but most people say, oh, you know what, I could get rid of 90% of the pictures and I'll be happier. So that's what I help people do.

MC BBC
And Geoff, you're interested in the way that we look at photographs. You quote Susan Sontag that they can be strong as evidence but weak on meaning.

Geoff Dyer
What I'm struck by if I can just link up with what Isabelle was saying is that, although things have you know exploded in recent years I like a way that everything that is happening now it's sort of prefigured by certain sort of examples from photographic history, somebody like Gary Winogrand who started out as a street photographer in New York, in his final years he ended up here in Los Angeles, went completely out of control and ended up taking a great many pictures and then gradually stopped doing exhibition prints stopped doing studio prints stopped then doing contact sheets, and then even stop to developing the pictures who've taken so here we get a sort of one man example if you like, of the thing that Isabelle is describing except that at least when it's with your phone pictures there is a moment when you, when you look at them after you've after you've taken them, whereas for Winogrand there was this great mass of work, which you just didn't didn't even see so there's been this great kind of attraction for researchers to go to the place where his archive is in Tucson, to get into the pharaohs pyramid and see this kind of great mass of something like a third of a million exposures

MC BBC
And Isabelle. What do you think these big collections, what do you think they tell us about individual lives.

ID
I feel like this is really an expression of your your love of the family, and in the past I think people, when you had to pay for each, you know, role of film, You were not taking the same kind of pictures, so I'm really happy to see people taking pictures of things that they were not going to take before, but if, when you have too much, people, what I noticed, is people don't realize that it takes time to process what Winogrand did or didn't do at the end of his life is setting some time aside, and really look at each individual picture and do something, group the pictures and do something with them.

MC BBC
How much do you think the fact that we photograph ourselves so much, we photograph our families so much, have changed us as people, Geoff, you write about the fact that this kind of narcissism, if you like, is nothing new.

GD
Somebody, you know, like me, who, who grew up in a time when my memories of my childhood are of radium summers, but that's because with film being relatively expensive in those, you know, days of shortages of the early 1960s, and because of the, you know, because of the technology wasn't so advanced, you would only take photographs on, you know, lovely, sunny English days so though it's those photographs of me in my paddling pool on those rare sunny days that have come to constitute the whole of my memories of my childhood, but also we can go further back in time to DH Lawrence you know, who was complaining about the way that people used to have an idea of themselves, some some sort of inner being. He says now, the only sense people have of themselves is a little, of a little Kodak creature and he sort of rant on for a couple of pages in this essay, it's mostly called Art and morality and it's not about morality or art at all it's just him ranting on about this, this Kodachrome conception of the self, which of course, you know, we move on several iterations now become this iPhone conception of yourself whereby you don't do anything to do something is to be photographed to be photographed doing it so that there's no real point going to the Grand Canyon wonderful though that is, unless there's Instagram evidence to prove it.

ID
If you spend time actually editing down your photos and be really aware and actually do the work I do, the work with people, then they realize, oh my god it takes me so much time, and then they, they are more aware, that maybe they are going to change the way they take pictures and they're going to take less pictures and better pictures,

MC BBC
Isabelle Dervaux, Jeff Dyer, thank you both.