I have never entirely trusted photographs.
This is probably unfair.
A photograph does exactly what we ask of it. It captures a fraction of a second and keeps it with remarkable discipline.
We are the unreliable ones.
We return years later and expect the photograph to explain what happened.
It cannot.
It can show us who was standing there.
Who was smiling.
Where someone placed a hand.
Whether it was raining.
Sometimes, if the image is good enough, it can even show us where people were looking.
But it cannot tell us what happened five minutes earlier.
Or five minutes later.
Memory has no such limitations.
Memory edits.
It removes people from rooms.
Changes the weather.
Improves conversations.
Occasionally, it gives us the perfect response twenty years after we needed it.
Photographs are less generous.
There is something unsettling about finding an old image of yourself laughing.
Not because laughter is unusual.
Because the person in the photograph knows something you no longer do.
They know what the room sounded like.
They know who told the joke.
They know what everyone was worried about before someone lifted the camera.
You can study their face for hours.
They will not tell you.
Perhaps this is why photographs become more mysterious with age.
When they are new, we think we understand them.
Of course we do.
We were there.
Then years pass.
The details begin to loosen.
Someone asks where the photograph was taken and three people give three different answers.
A name is forgotten.
A building closes.
The person behind the camera disappears from the story entirely.
The image remains unchanged.
Our certainty does not.
I find myself returning to old photographs when I am thinking about stories.
Not because I want to recreate what they show.
I am more interested in what they cannot show.
The conversation outside the frame.
The empty chair.
The person who arrived late.
The reason someone is smiling when everyone else looks tired.
A photograph is often treated as evidence.
Perhaps it is.
But evidence of what?
That these people were in this place.
At this moment.
For this fraction of a second.
Everything else belongs to memory.
And memory has been rewriting the story ever since.
Maybe photographs do not remember differently.
Maybe they are the only things that remember honestly.
That may be why we find them so difficult to believe.
— D. Vaen