What can be included in "Print Culture"?

In one of my non-archives classes the other day, I was talking with a fellow student and I had been telling him about some of what was going on in the archives classes. He had mentioned a quote that he heard from one of the professors that he said he has on a Post-It by his computer.

Digital documents don't survive by accident.

This was implying that paper documents can. And if you leave paper documents sitting around for a hundred years, someone will still be able to find them and figure out what they were meant for. Digital documents don't work like that, you will be lucky to retrieve a file that was created in a program 15 years ago.

The question of "Are digital documents still part of print culture?" seems to be what I am getting at here. But that wasn't really my intent, it was just a great quote, and it can be an issue to be discussed later. The idea of items laying around for decades and still having the capacity to be recovered is fascinating and exciting. And it applies more to than just the "written word."

My interest is in photographs. I enjoy the visual nature of items and I would like to say that photographs can be just as valuable as text. Pictures can be understood in any language. They can give detail in a single glance that would take pages upon pages of text to convey.

I would like to share a video story of a photographer by the name of Leo Beachy. This story has a few parts to it: the story of the photographer and the story of the journey of his negatives. I was profoundly touched by this story, the amazing zeal for life and the extreme importance of photography in this man's life and the crazy happenstance that some of his work still survives today. This video left me very misty-eyed. I hope that you will enjoy the story, as well.

Leo Beachy's Story