the title is the photographs

I promise to ask no questions here. I am going to say what I think as clearly as I can.

I have always loved photographs, not images on a screen or artist-work on a gallery wall (wonderful as those may be), but 4x6 or 5x7 drugstore-developed photographs. The format is vanishing, but I don’t intend to offer any more of an elegy for photo-album photographs than I will for any other part of the world. Everything will fade and peel and crumble or degrade and disappear and that is the way it is. The point is to see what is here.

My favorite metaphor to describe a photograph’s relationship to time and the visual world is “snapshot.” In the word there’s a sense of the action of a moment’s attention, the desire to seize.

I love photographs, but I don’t take them myself with any dedication. The excuse is that my spatial and mechanical and technological intelligences are limited. (I once took a filmmaking course and so misapplied the concept of the f-stop the images of people and places were shadows within shadows.) But of course I could have applied myself if I really wanted to make photographs; the whole truth is I didn’t want to. I don’t need to. It’s enough that there are other people taking photographs. I don’t feel the same way about language: I always want to add my own words, if only as an echo. But I can look at photographs and want to give away all control of my eyes. I feel this way looking through other people’s photo albums; I feel this way looking at photographs in museums; I feel this way reading photo books; I feel this way looking through stacks of old family snapshots from my childhood; I feel this way sorting through the results of my own few attempts at capturing something.

It wasn’t until after I had already picked up and saved two discarded photographs — one of what seems to be a post-blood-donation recovery table of orange juice and pretzels found in Lowell, Massachusetts; years later, one of looking up through a blurred blossoming tree found in Ithaca, New York — that I consciously became a collector of found photographs.

I am a walker of cities. Since the year 2002, I have kept an alertness for white rectangles of photograph-size in sidewalk rubbish (nearly all the photographs I’ve found have been face-down; face-up they are less easy to ignore). Mostly I turn over nothings like postcard advertisements for nightclubs, flimsy inserts for packages of Twinkies. But, every now and then, a soul.

The attention to finding and preserving lost photographs led to my seeking out, in the junk shops of Baltimore, the baskets of fading brown-gray photographs from lifetimes past, each one marked on the back maybe with some word of identification — a name, a place, a date — and, in the inhumanly thin scratch of a mechanical-pencil lead, a price (3, 1, .50).

Nearly all found photographs are striking; because they appeared from nowhere, they are the opposite of blankness. The discovery of a necessary photograph from a pile of old photographs in a dark corner of a junk-shop is different. Something inside the old photograph itself — a facial expression, a musical arrangement of landscape and body, a mystery — must strike a bell in you that you did not know was there.

I’ve always wanted to do something with the found and old and amateur photographs, put them into some sort of order for myself in a way that would both help me see what I saw in the photographs, what they meant to me, and also help me share that vision and feeling and order with someone else. I imagined a room of unframed photographs tacked to a bare wall with silver pins. But that idea wasn’t enough; I needed words.

I constructed a little book of some of the found photographs paired with brief surrealist descriptions of the dreamlife of Baltimore, where many of the photographs were found. The book didn’t work. I didn’t know why then: photographs have nothing to do with dreams. They can seem strange, but they are also the everyday waking world. They can be written about directly.

In high school I was a passenger in a car that lost grip on a sandy curve and slid off the road into a tree. I drove that road more or less every day, both before and after the crash. The tree itself still bears a scar from the crash. Before I and my family moved away from my hometown, I took a photograph of the tree because I needed to have a photograph of the tree with me.

Every time I drive by a car wreck or even just a dented car in a parking lot, I find myself examining the broken and bent places; there is something important to see there. A wrecked car is much more specific than what a car is in a commercial, in a daydream. The wound is what is real.

Shopping malls are meant to be attractive, not beautiful. The economic activities that proceed there come to seem a representation of a culture — the endless availability of only semi-useful materialism, the replacement of a shared public square with an alarmed, artificially clean marketplace.

And yet I love shopping malls. I love the chintzy, metallic shining of the decorations at Christmas time; I love the crowds, how people carry winter coats draped over their arms. I love the faces of strangers who are absorbed in thinking about and looking at something that has nothing to do with me.

Another reason I am not a photographer of people is I find interacting with strangers nerve-wracking. I can’t even imagine myself asking a stranger, “Can I take a picture?” This is moral and aesthetic cowardice. Thumbing through photographs, collecting found photographs, is a way to look without being looked at in return.

A photograph of someone who is now dead is also the idea that there is no such thing as loss. From a certain perspective, God’s, all of time is one object, endless but whole, like the surface of a globe. From this perspective, a moment is both ephemeral and eternal.

One of my favorite words in English is “daughter.” It’s a weird, heavy word. All the other essential relationship words are simpler: “son”; “husband”; “mother.” Only “daughter” has such a dense internal collision of letters. The Oxford dictionary tells me “daughter” rhymes with “aorta” and “water.”

Giving attention to photographs changes what looking at the world is. The eye becomes more camera-like; the empty air is a series of potential frames; the layers of the world insist on themselves — there is always a foreground and a background, a decision of focus.

But nothing tangible comes from looking at the world this way — no actual photographs and, unless your memory is like a camera, only a very few memories. Mostly the world disappears when you look away. But when you look away from the world you are also looking into the world from a different angle. How much there is to see and not be able to remember.

There is no way to see the world as it appears through someone else’s eyes; there is no argument that proves other people are real. Truly looking into a photograph requires faith.

There is so much possibility in America, so much time and space. There are so many individual imaginations in America, each seeking to populate the time and space with words and images and meaning, each seeking to imagine and then see, or see and then imagine, a whole.

Beauty in a photograph is not evidence of another world shining through, but neither is it mere shimmering appearance. The experience of being struck by the beautiful in a photograph is the epiphanic recognition of what the world is: the contained and the uncontainable, structure and freedom, growth and stillness and decay, light and darkness, life and death, truth.