But our experience is limited: most local events are missed when our attention
is drawn to specific details, or when we are lost in thought, or encumbered by
diversions. One thing is certain-the things we hold most dear will change both
physically and in our mind's eye. The notions we hold and the objects we value
are transient. All things, whether we cherish them, despise them or are indifferent
to them, wll be lost. Physical contours will erode and memories will evolve and
transform until they are no more. The objects we have created and used, the ideas
we have formulated and made manifest through language, will become the traces-the
artifacts-of our experience, left only for others to decipher.These images are more than just figurations of the things that have passed before my eyes. Certainly they reveal objects and people and state for the record that the things you see were in a particular place at a particular time. These pictures are reminders of "facts," like the light looked a certain way that day, or wisps of hair fell ina particular manner, or this person or that person happen to be walking to a place wearing these clothes. I can use these images as my proof that certain things were a specific way and life had a distinctive beauty at the time they were taken. Life was as it is portrayed; only-I, or you, or we, or they/he/she-was there to feel the air and sun and the rain in that place. These traces evoke moments that were. But these moments, chosen out of the continuum of time, point to something else as well, something that had an evident weight on my mind. I stood before these people in this place and had a kind of recognition of something unnamable that compelled me to freeze their-and my-circumstance into being. Because of that impulse, the images not only reveal what was there
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