“Today, we take photography for granted. Anyone can take a photograph simply by pressing a button. Yet, it was not always so simple. The invention of photography was announced in 1839, but during its first fifty years taking a photograph was a complicated and expensive business. In 1888, all this was to change following the appearance of a camera that was to revolutionize photography. Popular photography can properly be said to have started 120 years ago with the introduction of the Kodak”. – The UK National Media Museum. Photo: Two men on the deck of a ship, about 1890. (Photo by Collection of National Media Museum/Kodak Museum)

Museum employee Victoria views a giant grouper fish specimen at the Natural History Museum in west London March 25, 2015. It forms part of a new exhibition, “Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea”, featuring a panoramic virtual dive and over 250 specimens from the Museum's coral, fish and marine invertebrate collection, which opens on March 27. (Photo by Toby Melville/Reuters)

Miley Cyrus attends the Heavenly Bodies: Fashion & The Catholic Imagination Costume Institute Gala at The Metropolitan Museum of Art on May 7, 2018 in New York City. (Photo by Mike Coppola/MG18/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue)

Five year old George holds an orange to feed the Owl butterflies at the Natural History Museum in London, Thursday, March 30, 2017. Hundreds of tropical butterflies were released to launch the Natural History Museum's Sensational Butterflies exhibition, starting for the public on March 31, 2017. (Photo by Frank Augstein/AP Photo)

A monolith placed in the Utah wilderness in November 2020. New clues have surfaced in the disappearance of the gleaming monolith that seemed to melt away as mysteriously as it appeared in the red-rock desert. A Colorado photographer told a TV station in Salt Lake City that he saw four men push over the hollow, stainless steel structure last Friday night. (Photo by Terrance Siemon/AP Photo)

Visitors photograph an animatronic Tyrannosaurus Rex at the National Museum of Scotland, July 29, 2011. (Photo by David Moir/Reuters)

A tourist takes photographs of the Louvre Museum in Paris, France on July 3, 2022. (Photo by Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

People will spout about impermanence of digital records, but books are really fragile, too. Alexis Arnold from San Francisco wanted to illustrate that with her project The Crystallized Book: collecting books and growing Borax crystals on them. Books range from literature classics to magazines, and there’s even a mysterious and arcane tome called “Linux: The Complete Manual”.