Photographs are, of course, artifacts… Thus they trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real. They are clouds of fantasy and pellets of information. Photography has become the quintessential art of affluent, wasteful, restless societies – an indispensable tool of the new mass culture that took shape here after the Civil War… p. 69

To look at an old photograph of oneself, or anyone one has known, or or a much photographed public person is to feel, first of all: how much younger I (she, he) was then. Photography is an inventory of mortality…
Photographs state the innocence, the vulnerability of lives heading toward their own destruction, and this link between photography and death haunts all photographs of people. p. 70

Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past. p. 71

-excerpts On Photography, Melancholy Objects by Susan Sontag, published 1973

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Yesterday late in the day I met a friend at Ambrosia.  The fine bakery afforded us coffee with whipped cream, and a tasty chocolate chip muffin, delicately sweetened with sugar crystals.  We talked about the pleasures of photography,  Al asked that I demonstrate how to send a photograph using my iphone.  I transmitted a recently taken image of a delicate columbine blossom.  I was not as successful demonstrating transmission of a photo with Al’s Android phone.   I am not familiar with that operating system.

Capturing, sharing photographs is our attempt to hold onto the past is it not?  Inevitably we fail, as time is a river, and we are borne along in the current.  That somehow, (by magic) time can be stopped, is illusion, a sad conjuring of the impossible.  But we are bound to try.

Al and I are planning a day trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin in the near future.  It has been a while since we’ve been there.  Naturally we will comment on what has changed. 

Naturally we will take a few photos.