In 1999, The Guardian made its shift from analogue to digital photography. Photographer Graham Turner recalls the transitionary period in which he used one of the first digital cameras at the Guardian:
It really was quite horrible to use. So slow, very poor battery life – one job would drain the battery. The cards stored so few photos, it was necessary to wait and wait for them to be stored and the quality was really rather poor ... on the other hand, I did feel, and so did my colleagues, that we were at the forefront of a new technological era which was rather exciting.
Turner continued to use the camera until September 2003, when it was rendered obsolete. We now look after this camera in the Archive.
The Kodak Canon Professional DCS 520 EOD-1N digital camera used by Turner was once at the cutting edge of technology. Originally released in 1998, it was the first truly portable digital SLR camera available at the time. If you were fortunate enough to be able to purchase one of these cameras, it would have set you back close to $15,000 (around £9000). Its creation was a collaboration between American film giant Kodak and Japanese camera maker Canon. When it came to marketing the camera, Canon promoted it as the ‘D2000’ with just the Canon logo visible, whereas Kodak released the camera as the ‘DCS 520’ with both Canon and Kodak badging.
The camera weighed 1.65kg, allowing it to be carried around with relative ease compared to its predecessors. It boasted an almost seamlessly merged back and body, a whopping 2 mega pixels picture resolution, a rechargeable battery, an LCD viewing screen and even had ‘Pong’ game built into the menu. The camera we have in the Archive is accompanied with a memory card. It is about the size of a credit card and can carry up to 160 megabytes of data. To put that into context, the storage capacity of some present-day mobile phones start at around 16 gigabytes, which is 100 times larger than the camera’s memory card.
The introduction of digital photography has significantly influenced the way in which we store and search for images at the Guardian and Observer. The GNM Archive holds hundreds of thousands of prints and millions of images on negative taken by Guardian and Observer photographers before 1999. They were filed by teams of picture librarians by subject, date or personality. To view these images now, the archivists physically go to the archive, find the correct location and view the negatives which are stored in sleeves. Today, the newspapers’ images are stored digitally on a specialist asset management system and are viewable to journalists and picture editors at the click of a button.
It is interesting to consider how digital technology has revolutionised the way in which we take photographs worldwide. We are taking more photos now than we ever have before. In 1998, 67 billion photographs were taken around the world. By the end of 2017, that number had increased to an estimated 1.2 trillion. The advent of camera phones has undoubtedly fuelled this, making anybody and everybody a photographer. It is feasible to believe that perhaps the Digital SLR may soon become obsolete in favour of increasingly sophisticated camera phones. We might even see photojournalists of the future capturing images using the same cameras as the rest of us.
If you would like to visit the GNM Archive to see the camera, or to view other records, objects and photographs in the collections, please consult the online catalogue and email the archive team to book an appointment.
