Today, while you are reading this Web Extra, humans will take,(or shoot, click, store, upload, file) more photographic images than existed for the first 150 years of photography. By one estimate in 2014 the average was about 657 BILLION photos a day.

  All but a tiny fraction of them are ephemeral.

  They are digital images stored on cameras, computers and drives that can crash or be lost; on cloud servers and internet files that may seem permanent but really exist as a whim of companies and business executives; on phones that are one accidental washing machine experience from oblivion.

  That is why this image may be the most significant picture of them all:

  It is of a mounted wet plate image in the hands of an archivist.

  Specifically, it is a wet plate photo of Cheyenne Eete Kippenberger

( https://www.gatheringofnations.com/miw-cheyenne-kippenberger/ ) taken by photo artist Shane Balkowitsch ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shane_Balkowitsch ) using a classic photographic technique

( https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/eastman-wet-plate-photography/  ) and donated to the Library of Florida History where it is in the clutches of archivist Holly Baker. It has a fighting chance of being preserved for the 400 years or so considered the standard of archival preservation.

  This plate and the others taken the same day (as explained in a segment of Florida Frontiers- https://myfloridahistory.org/frontiers/radio/program/436 ) are all destined to be housed in archives and collections where they, and the history they document, will be preserved as long as possible.

  One wonders if our distant descendants will be familiar enough with the quaint old style American English to realize the photographic process reverses the words in the image or if they will consider it to be a sub-dialect.