Wouldn’t it be interesting to have a photograph of Julius Caesar just after he landed in Briton standing with one of the ‘Prits’ by a flag of Imperial Rome? Or to see Michelangelo hammering away at some large piece of stone out of which is emerging a hand or a head? To hold a black and white image of Chin on one his campaigns to unite China, or have Akhenaten in all his finery surrounded by stunned priests. To see Toussaint Louverture before he lost his final battle?
We can never see Vercingetorix shackled in Rome, Pericles swaying the Ecclesia to do away with this or that; never know what the individuals and great people looked like thousands of years ago. We have no pictures of the thirty-six women the whole human race is said to descend from over the past fifty thousand years. Would an expression tell us something more, show us something history loses? Would we see that each and every person lives every day of their lives and not just the highlights? Would we mark a tiredness or a joy, see the clothes bring their stance to life?
We have lost so many faces. They are all still there in us of course, because we are pictures of all that has gone before us. But we cannot recapture their exact likeness. And as I look at old photographs and people I never knew show their living-ness to me, I think that a heavy loss.