A mystery photographer and the slipperiness of knowledge

The Guardian has a rather fascinating story about a large collection of photographs whose creator is unknown. The photographs are described as "superb," yet no one knows who took them. Lindy Grant, a curator at the Courtauld Institute is doing some detective work, trying to figure out just who this phantom photographer was. His (Grant doesn't think a woman could travel alone with the camera used, though I'm not sure that guarantees that a man took the photos) locations at various dates can be ascertained, as can the equipment he used. But beyond that, there's not much to go on. Provenance is of no help, since the collection was given by the Leicester Musuem, which now has no records at all of ever having the collection. So it looks as if the Courtauld is left with a rather fine collection of photographs with no name to attach to them.

Cases like this highlight just how fragile knowledge is. David Lowenthal touches upon this somewhere near the beginning of The Past is a Foreign Country, pointing out that when each person dies, innumerable unique memories vanish forever. The state of human knowledge is in constant flux; we're always learning things and forgetting things. And only those things that get recorded in some form even have a chance of being known by future generations. And the preservation of knowledge is pretty haphazard. We have Samuel Pepys's diary, of course, but it's entirely possible that there was a whole rash of diarists of the 17th century who painted vastly different pictures of London. We just don't know.

The internet could be changing things, at least in terms of preservation of records. It'd be rather interesting to see the amount how text produced (and maintained) per capita changed over time. But even the solipsism of personal blogs only captures a fraction of human experience. Think about the things you did today. How many of them will you remember a week from now? How about a month? And a year?

Knowledge is slipping away from us every day. A hundred years from now, it's entirely possible that someone could stumble upon the archives of high-traffic, anonymous blogs (see, for example, Atrios and Tacitus) and have no way of determining the identity of their authors. Just like that mystery photographer.