Photos are fragile – almost as fragile as memories. However, familiar dangers such as loss or damage to the physical negative are, in reality, the least ominous of the threats to current photo archives.

Too often archivists are handed collections after the creator has died, and with them much of the contextual information that adds immeasurable historic value to understanding the importance of the material. The foresight in tackling this archival project while David is still a working journalist means that not only will his images be preserved, but along with them the critical contextual information about them, and the stories behind the lens. In the age of the Internet we are able to share vast quantities of images in the blink of an eye, however without metadata, the true import of those images is often lost to history.