| This week I discovered Life Tags, a Google Arts & Culture experiment that used algorithms to catalog more than four million images from the Life Magazine archive. Launched in association with Meredith, which acquired the Life archive when it bought Time Inc. late last year, Life Tags creates the first easily searchable and publicly accessible database of the iconic magazine's impressive past. The results are impressive. There are 11,852 images of cowboys in the Life archive. A search for "black cat" comes back with 449 photographs, while an "adhesive bandage" was shot only once during the magazine's golden age. It is easy to fall down the rabbit hole when you first visit the archive, exploring the thousands of tags and categories offered by Google. There is little doubt that we can learn a lot from this experiment - about the way we lived from 1936 to 1972, about the way Life covered the world in those years, but also about our biases and prejudices. But I can't help but wonder what this experiment says about the photographic industry. There are billion of images that lie, unexplored and unrecognized, in hard drives, salt mines and warehouses. And at a time when we bemoan the hegemony of tech giants in our lives - an importance that can have real-world consequences as we have seen in the past presidential elections – it is disappointing to see that only a company like Google has the desire and power to make these mines of information about our world and our past available to all to explore. -- Olivier Laurent |
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