Long Gone

I've always thought of a photograph as an ineffective portal from my present to someone else's. An old family photograph carries with it some sense of that person's environment, beliefs, culture—all of which are a projection, a thinly sourced fabrication that I apply to the image.

A found photograph of a stranger is eerily different. I will cobble together a series of notions about the person or place—these are tried out and refined every time I look at the image. A cast-off photo or tintype is entirely ungrounded, there isn't anything to guide one back to its making. Maybe I can pin-down the decade, probably the country—that's it. Yet, the person, the human life represented in the image—always in some state of decline or decay as an object—can only remain a stranger, a photographic phantom.

What's both maddening and beautiful to me is that I know the image/object of this stranger, at one time, had an identity and a place—it belonged to someone who looked at it, thought about it, knew about her.

Or him.

You can digitize the image, zoom in to look at each ragged pixel that forms the face, the hands, a treasured broach or lapel pin—but it never really tells you anything more about the life represented.