The Purpose of the Original

I am in Fredericton, New Brunswick, for a conference on something or other (film studies, yawn).
On my way into town from the airport my cabbie and I discussed today's outbreak of tornadoes in Massachusetts. She said she has a lot of family in and around Boston, and also in Texas, Indiana, etc. She said they are all accustomed to tornadoes, they all have ways of dealing with them to the point where they accept them as a part of daily life.

One thing she said struck me as odd. She was speaking of their basement refuges, how they have fully stocked hideaways that they can retreat to in case of a dangerous storm. Then she went on to say that her sister makes copies of photographs and puts the copies in frames to mount on the walls upstairs, but she keeps the originals in a box in the basement. Every time she wants to frame a family photo, she makes a photocopy of that photo and puts the photocopy in a frame on the wall and stores the original in a box downstairs.

I understand the sense of the value of the photographs that her sister feels is important to preserve from imminent destruction, but what made my head turn was the idea that the originals lie somewhere hidden from sight and that she is content with photocopies instead of originals. I guess it makes sense. But does it diminish the photographic value of those images? This woman is living with copies on her wall; not duplicate prints, but photocopies. Is there any artistic value in the originals that is worth seeing on a daily basis? Or are these crude copies sufficient to communicate the basic information contained within them (this is so-and-so with so-and-so... oh, and that's your cousin)?

It occurred to me that photography is so powerful that we accept it as a normal way of seeing. At some time or other we all look at photographs and see, not the photograph itself, but the content contained within the photograph. We construct identities and affirm relationships via the magical reproduction of the experience of sight. At what point do our ability to see and our ability to recognize sight in a photograph become one? Doesn't it complicate our sense of reality to acknowledge such a difference? If it doesn't, shouldn't it?

If images can exist in a variety of forms, from the original to the duplicate to the photocopy to the artist's rendition, and if we can accept that these differences are different modes of the same concept, then we must have an innate understanding of this multiplicity, such that we can differentiate between them while also assuming their sameness. It implies that our experience of the world is not simply a conscious endeavour, and yet for all the subconscious happenings in our minds we still accept the world as primarily a rational, straightforward actuality.

In the words of Roland Barthes (spoken with a French accent), "That is some heavy shit."