are at once a joy and a deep sadness. We take them to remember, forgetting that as time goes on memory itself changes until it is more than just a moment or two of time, but a place we can no longer visit except in our minds. The people we can no longer talk to, the friendships that are caught in the amber of time which we can no longer explore.
And the photographs come to others who look at our lives with their own experience and yet with a lack of knowledge and depth. These are not their friends, their loves or the faces they recognise. These are not their families. And the clothes look strange even in colour, and the oddest thing elicits a smile like seeing someone in a T-shirt or dressed up . . . or holding an umbrella.
Photographs, even as they are taken, are history. Living history. Shared history. They are art in light, capturing all that can be caught by the process which of course, is never everything or even the most important things. What were they thinking about in these pictures? What were they feeling? What were they hoping?
You can put a lot of passion into a photograph if you try hard enough but you can rarely find much truth. That’s not what they are about.