my sister once gave me a photoalbum bought from an odds and ends shop on duthy st. it's full of photographs of people, a family album; people at the beach, at a wedding, in their finery. their setting is europe, they appear wealthy; the photos are not in chronological order, but first ones apear to have been taken in the mid-1920s. there are no photos from the early 30s; they begin again in the 50s.
initially i found the photographs fascinating, and peered at them as if a puzzle, trying to figure out places and dates. who were these people? it almost felt like a debt i owed them, to attend to their photographs, to pay them heed.
"The most transitory of things, a shadow, the proverbial emblem of all that is fleeting and momentary, may be fettered by the spells of our "natural magic", and may be fixed forever in the position which it seemed only destined for a single instant to occupy." (William Henry Fox Talbot)
(who is that, hiding behind the tree?)
the pictures were valuable because they were traces of presence, of life.
But then, I forgot about them. (those intense but fleeting infatuations; fickle)
I found them yesterday, and felt the same guilt. How could i not treasure them? Their poignancy? "Photography is an elegaic art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos." (s. sontag)
That paradox of the photograph: its capacity to defy the instant by capturing it; and yet because it can capture innumerable instants, their value seeps away, the instant multiplies into meaninglessness.
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