Faded Photographs Quotes

I'm the girl who is lost in space, the girl who is disappearing always, forever fading away and receding farther and farther into the background. Just like the Cheshire cat, someday I will suddenly leave, but the artificial warmth of my smile, that phony, clownish curve, the kind you see on miserably sad people and villains in Disney movies, will remain behind as an ironic remnant. I am the girl you see in the photograph from some party someplace or some picnic in the park, the one who is in fact soon to be gone. When you look at the picture again, I want to assure you, I will no longer be there. I will be erased from history, like a traitor in the Soviet Union. Because with every day that goes by, I feel myself becoming more and more invisible...

It's funny, but certain faces seem to go in and out of style. You look at old photographs and everybody has a certain look to them, almost as if they're related. Look at pictures from ten years later and you can see that there's a new kind of face starting to predominate, and that the old faces are fading away and vanishing, never to be seen again.

You have your wonderful memories," people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

From in the shadow she calls. And in the shadow she finds a way, finds a way. And in the shadow she crawls, clutching her faded photograph. My image under her thumb. Yes with a message for my heart. She’s been everybody else’s girl maybe one day she’ll be her own.

Memories have no life. They're just pale reminders of a time that's gone-like faded photographs.

I remember it all: every word, every breath, every tick of the clock . . . everything that happened is with me forever. I can never forget it. But that dosen't mean I can live it again. You can't live what's gone, you can only remember it, and memories have no life. They're just pale reminders of a time that's gone - like faded photographs, or a dried-up daisy chain at the back of a drawer. They have no substance. They can't take you back. Nothing can take you back. Nothing can be the same as it was. Nothing is. All I can do is tell it.

Like an unprotected photograph some friendships fade. People grow apart, lose touch, want different things. Dreams, woven together, unravel.

Havana is like a woman who was grand once and has fallen on hard times, and yet hints of her former brilliance remain, traces of an era since passed, a photograph faded by time and circumstance, its edges crumbling to dust.

Hauntings are memes, especially pernicious thought contagions, social contagions that need no viral or bacterial host and are transmitted in a thousand different ways. A book, a poem, a song, a bedtime story, a grandmother's suicide, the choreography of a dance, a few frames of film, a diagnosis of schizophrenia, a deadly tumble from a horse, a faded photograph, or a story you tell your daughter.

Nothing in my life ever seemed to fade away or take its rightful place among the pantheon of experiences that constituted my eighteen years. It was all still with me, the storage space in my brain crammed with vivid memories, packed and piled like photographs and old dresses in my grandmother’s bureau. I wasn’t just the madwoman in the attic — I was the attic itself. The past was all over me, all under me, all inside me.

What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release.

Manage me, I am a mess, swept under the rug of yesterday’s home improvement, a whimsical urge tossed aside for the easy reassurance of home and comfort. I am the photograph tucked away as a book-mark, in a book left half unread, once reopened to find memories crawling back into peripheral sight, faded, creased and lonely. I long to be admired, long to be held, torn and laughed at, laughed with, like a distant relative or an old friend breathing in their last breath. I missed the moment when time collapsed and memory was erased, replaced by finicky social experiments, lost in the blur of intoxication, sucked through multi-colored bendy-straws, making way for a spinning world where hub-caps stood still, but our vision didn’t. If I could leave you with only one thing, it would be small, foldable, and made from trees, with a few careless words, scribbled in blue; Take a minute to learn me, take a moment to love me, because I need your love to live,and without it, I am nothing.

I have a hunch that our obsession with photography arises from an unspoken pessimism; it is our nature to believe the good things will not last. . . But photos provide a false sense of security> like our flawed memory, they are guaranteed to fade. . . . We take photographs in order to remember, but it is in the nature of a photograph to forget (pg 157)

I need to leave something behind. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I'll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won't notice and wash it away. As I'm looking around I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It's another in the family series - a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls. It comes off the wall easily.I set the print on the bedspread and wit eht dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hood. I take out a Sharpie from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unremoved, for years. I fill the whiter space with this: I never got to tell you how beautiful you are. And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.

Coming home was like trying to step into a faded family photograph—one that had been partially torn so that the image was incomplete.

As the years pass by, we’ll glance at faded photographs recalling memories shared with special friends and family, never wanting it to end. Memories are the only thing left within the end.” Judy

Is the child in that old photograph really an erstwhile version of you, your little hand waving farewell? The face of that child is nothing like the face you have now. That child’s face is now melding with the blackness behind you, before you, around you. The child is waving and smiling and fading as your car keeps skidding toward your abruptly curtailed future. Bye-bye.

Its hurtful and wonderful how our jokes survive us. Since I left home on this journey, I've thought a lot about this-how a big part of any life is about the hows and whys of setting up machinery. it's building systems, devices, motors. Winding up the clockwork of direct debits, configuring newspaper deliveries and anniversaries and photographs and credit card repayments and anecdotes. Starting their engines, setting them in motion and sending them chugging off into the future to do their thing at a regular or irregular intervals. When a person leaves or dies or ends, they leave an afterimage; their outline in the devices they've set up around them. The image fades to the winding down of springs, the slow running out of fuel as the machines of a life lived in certain ways in certain places and from certain angles are shut down or seize up or blink off one by one. It takes time. Sometimes, you come across the dusty lights or electrical hum of someone else's machine, maybe a long time after you ever expected to, still running, lonely in the dark. Still doing its thing for the person who started it up long, long after they've gone. A man lives so many different lengths of time.

You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone. Memories are the Westlake uniforms in the closet, the faded and cracked photographs, the invitations to the weddings of the people who are no longer married, the mass cards from the funerals of the people whose faces you no longer remember. Memories are what you no longer want to remember.

What you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I pray for that sort of release.

How can we hold onto those fleeting moments in our lives? Hold onto the moments that otherwise evaporate into the forgotten past? Or moments that become faded and morphed into our own version of reality as they sit in the corners of our memories, losing their truth and shifting focus? The only way to hold onto these moments and share them for years to come, in all their beauty and truth and glorious imperfections, without losing accuracy is through a photograph.

When they left, I saw four or five black-and-white photographs I had taken of you, peeping from the file. They'd faded a little over time and were stuck to each other. Delicately, i separated them.

looked genuinely saddened by the thought. ‘How many connections have you made going through boxes of old letters and faded sepia photographs? How many assignments would have fallen flat without them?’ ‘Too many,’ Tayte

Ironically, the memory of the women heroes of World War I was largely eclipsed by the very women they had inspired. The more blatant evil enacted into law by Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that those who fought against it would continue to fascinate long after the first war had become a vague, unpleasant memory—one brought to mind only by fading photographs of serious, helmeted young men standing in sandbagged trenches or smiling young women in ankle-length nursing uniforms, or by the presence of poppies in Remembrance Day ceremonies.

One of the things that helps use cope with loss is the fact that while memories may remian, the emotions associated with them will fade like old photographs. At the same time, there is a masochistic desire to retain those feelings spurred on by the dread of losing the power they hold. Sometimes I can't think of anything more awful than simply being human.

I try and reconstruct them from faded photographs and a few letters which survived the holocaust and my emigration to England nearly half a century ago. Their world has become submerged in the past, like Atlantis, and they have taken my childhood with them.

I turned off the projector and Alex mumbled something in her sleep and turned over. I said, "Everything is fine, I'm going home now," and said it just so I could say I'd said it in case she was upset later that I'd left without telling her. I thought about kissing her on the forehead but rejected the idea immediately; whatever physical intimacy had opened up between us had dissolved with the storm; even that relatively avuncular gesture would be strange for both of us now. More than that: it was as though the physical intimacy with Alex, just like the sociability with strangers or the aura around objects, wasn't just over, but retrospectively erased. Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they'd faded from the photograph.

Esme slowly turned the picture over, her hands beginning to tremble again. Inscribed across the back of the photograph, in a woman’s elegant script, were two words. The ink might have faded, but the sentiment would surely endure forever. Dix’s strong, warm arms went around her. He rested his cheek against hers as they whispered in unison,“My Darling”.

The very weather seems to have a quality of the past, faded weather like that of old photographs.

what you write down sometimes leaves you forever, like old photographs left in the bright sun, fading to nothing but white. I

Watch a good movie sometime without reference to what’s happening but only with attention to how it was photographed; you’ll see the change of focus—zoom in, pan out, close-up on face, fade to black, open from above—easily. You want to do that in what you write; it’s one of the things that keep people’s eyes on the page, though they’re almost never conscious of it.

The insides of my brain are a fading photograph, stories and images drifting away to places unknown. Leaving patches of nothingness where a name or an event or a location should be. Anyone

From my novel "Broken Things" (Lighthouse Publishing of the Carolinas): Those eyes had haunted his dreams―and nightmares too―for over a quarter of a century. “I wanted to tell you Allie’s in town. Allie Drake. You remember her, don’t you?” Jack’s gaze shifted back to his brother’s grinning face and suddenly he wanted to pop Steve right in the nose. Did he remember Allie Drake? What a stupid question!

A piece of me refuses to believe today was the last time I’d ever see my father’s face in person. From this day on, all I’ll have are photographs and my memories, and even those begin to fade over time.

With plastic siding that was cracked and fading, the trailer squatted on stacked cinder blocks, a temporary foundation that had somehow become permanent over time. It had a single bedroom and bath, a cramped living area, and a kitchen with barely enough room to house a mini refrigerator. Insulation was almost nonexistent, and humidity had warped the floors over the years, making it seem as if he were always walking on a slant. The linoleum in the kitchen was cracking in the corners, the minimal carpet was threadbare, and he’d furnished the narrow space with items he’d picked up over the years at thrift stores. Not a single photograph adorned the walls.

He was really quite addicted to her face, and yet for the longest time he could not remember it at all, it being so much brighter than sunlight on a pool of water that he could only recall that blinding brightness; then after awhile, since she refused to give him her photograph, he began to practice looking away for a moment when he was still with her, striving to uphold in his inner vision what he had just seen (her pale, serious, smooth and slender face, oh, her dark hair, her dark hair), so that after immense effort he began to retain something of her likeness although the likeness was necessarily softened by his fallibility into a grainy, washed-out photograph of some bygone court beauty, the hair a solid mass of black except for parallel streaks of sunlight as distinct as the tines of a comb, the hand-tinted costume sweetly faded, the eyes looking sadly, gently through him, the entire image cob-webbed by a sheet of semitranslucent Thai paper whose white fibers twisted in the lacquered space between her and him like gorgeous worms; in other words, she remained eternally elsewhere.

Actually, using the Daleks would be a masterstroke. Everyone loves Doctor Who - who wouldn't be thrilled by the sight of a real-life Dalek squadron rolling down the high street, glinting in the sun? The sheer excitement would genuinely make the accompanying loss of liberty seem worthwhile. To liven things up even more, our rasping pepperpot overlords would be colour-coded. Blue Daleks would deal with minor infractions, and would spend most of their time issuing warnings and administering minor shocks - but they'd also be chummy and approachable, and willing to pose for photographs with your nephew. Red Daleks, on the other hand, would be emotionless killing machines. Imagine the atmosphere outside a pub on a hot summer's day: a Red Dalek trundles past, and the convivial hubbub suddenly fades to a whisper. Everyone stiffens. And then he turns the corner and a communal sigh of relief goes up, and the drinking continues and the jukebox plays louder and louder... community spirit lives again. Admit it: it'd be fantastic.

Meatspace equals entropy. Impermanence. The fading of anger or passion is analogous to the fading of a photograph, the yellowing of old newspaper, as we’ve seen in a thousand movies. Through time we mend, heal, alter our convictions, learn; what burned cools, and what froze melts; both grief and delight are fated to end, sometimes abruptly, yes, but more often gradually, even imperceptibly. Entropy is our enemy, but also our friend; it defines that part of us that is changing, coming into bloom and then, because we are mortal, fading.

Well, take e-mail for example. People don’t write to each other anymore, do they? Once my generation’s gone, the written letter will be consigned to social history. Tell me, Jefferson. When did you last write a letter?’ Tayte had to think about it. When the occasion came to him, he smiled, wide and cheesy. ‘It was to you,’ he said. ‘I wrote you on your sixtieth birthday.’ ‘That was five years ago.’ ‘I still wrote you.’ Marcus looked sympathetic. ‘It was an e-mail.’ ‘Was it?’ Marcus nodded. ‘You see my point? Letters are key to genealogical research, and they’re becoming obsolete. Photographs are going the same way.’ He looked genuinely saddened by the thought. ‘How many connections have you made going through boxes of old letters and faded sepia photographs? How many assignments would have fallen flat without them?’ ‘Too many,’ Tayte agreed. ‘I can’t see genealogists of the future fervently poring over their clients’ old e-mails, can you? Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the excitement and the scent of time that so often accompanies the discovery?’ He had Tayte there, too. Tayte’s methods were straight out of the ‘Marcus Brown School of Family History.’ Tripping back into the past through an old letter and a few photographs represented everything he loved about his work. It wouldn’t be the same without the sensory triggers he currently took for granted.

In silent agreement we squeeze into the window to study our valley. Unlovely in the early spring, crusted with think rime of muddy snow, the river still choked with ice, a single dark thread of water at it’s centre. Sleeping tangle of grey saplings, dead shrubs of sepia or amber or faded dogwood red. Brown sparrows and dust-colored pigeons. The only real color is magpipes, repeated shouts of iridescence, irritatingly clean in their black and white suits. Like photographs of actor or spies. How do they stay so clean in this crap, I always wonder.

WE ARE We are the lost ones Seeking refuge in dark alleys Told we are not forgotten We are a past generation's hope Asking daily for forgiveness Viewed as misbegotten We are restorers of humanity Who punished betrayers of justice Now the hangman in his own noose We are the select few Wandering parks and streets Lost in a sea of endless faces We are the faded photographs Stored in an attic Yearning to finish our missions We are both the young and the old Poised on the cliff's edge Thinking of a last goodnight We are our nation's warriors Destined to become Line-items in a county's budget

If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role. I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.

We realize, though, because we must, that remembrance is finite. It crosses only so many generations before it fades to indistinction. One man remembers his father and perhaps his grandfather and the details of the lives that were lived. But it's harder to see further back in time. I know the name of my great-grandfather, but our living time did not intersect. We did not walk the earth at the same time. Thus, to me he's a photograph; a story I heard my grandfather tell. He's not a life I remember. And my children may not know him at all, unless by chance they can find him in a book. In time, he will be forgotten entirely, just as we all will with enough revolutions of the earth around the slowly expiring sun. Each fragile heart now beating will one day stop ... We are little more than one tree's growth of leaves in hillside forest. We will enjoy our brief moment in the sun, only to fall away with all the other to make way for the next bright young generation.

To Lincoln, words always mattered most. Newspaper stories lived but a single day, caricatures flamed into view and just as quickly faded, and even the most flattering photographs inevitably receded behind the thick covers of family albums. But words lived forever. Writing, Lincoln believed, was “the great invention of the world.

This was the process by which two lives were disentangled, eventually the dread and discomfort would fade and be replaced by unbroken indifference, I would see him in the street by chance, and it would be like seeing an old photograph of yourself: you recognize the image but are unable to remember quite what it was to be that person.

Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How about—the Saffron Shift. If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or living forest floor. Assigning hues to time periods, the sum total of history is saffron-brown—but the chromatic arc starts from blinding white (prehistory) to sun-yellow (Ancient Greece), then deepening to pale wood tones (Dark Ages) and finally exploding like an infinite chord into a full brown palette that includes mahoganies, siennas (Middle Ages), oak, sandalwood (the Renaissance), cherry, maple (Age of Reason), and near-black old woods (Industrial Revolution) for which there may not be names. As time approaches our own, the wood-brown palette fades to a weird glassy colorlessness, goes black-and-white for a brief span as you think of photographs of your grandparents, and then again fades until we get a clear medium that is the color of the world. And the present moment is perfectly transparent. It's only as you start looking into the future, that the colors start returning. The glass is turning silvery with a murky haze, and there is blue somewhere in the distance . . .

We sleep and nap in bed--my two piled up mattresses on the bare wooden floor. We are silent, dreamy. She surveys my photographs crowded on the wall. I have no particular subject, no special theme. The Brooklyn Bridge at dawn will do, tugs and their milky wake, elms fading in the fading light, my postman and his green mailbag. It's the shooting the excites me. Printing is the fatiguing task after the action, the dressing of the game after the hunt.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

Lucinda might sneak from her own house at midnight to place a wager somewhere else, but she dared not touch the pack that lay in her own sideboard. She knew how passionate he had become about his 'weakness.' She dared not even ask him how it was he had reversed his opinions on the matter. But, oh, how she yearned to discuss it with him, how much she wished to deal a hand on a grey wool blanket. There would be no headaches then, only this sweet consummation of their comradeship. But she said not a word. And although she might have her 'dainty' shoes tossed to the floor, have her bare toes quite visible through her stockings, have a draught of sherry in her hand, in short appear quite radical, she was too timid, she thought, too much a mouse, to reveal her gambler's heart to him. She did not like this mouselike quality. As usual, she found herself too careful, too held in. Once she said: 'I wish I had ten sisters and a big kitchen to laugh in.' Her lodger frowned and dusted his knees. She thought: He is as near to a sister as I am likely to get, but he does not understand. She would have had a woman friend so they could brush each other's hair, and just, please God, put aside this great clanking suit of ugly armor. She kept her glass dreams from him, even whilst she appeared to talk about them. He was an admiring listener, but she only showed him the opaque skin of her dreams--window glass, the price of transporting it, the difficulties with builders who would not pay their bills inside six months. He imagined this was her business, and of course it was, but all the things she spoke of were a fog across its landscape which was filled with such soaring mountains she would be embarrassed to lay claim to them. Her true ambition, the one she would not confess to him, was to build something Extraordinary and Fine from glass and cast iron. A conservatory, but not a conservatory. Glass laced with steel, spun like a spider web--the idea danced around the periphery of her vision, never long enough to be clear. When she attempted to make a sketch, it became diminished, wooden, inelegant. Sometimes, in her dreams, she felt she had discovered its form, but if she had, it was like an improperly fixed photograph which fades when exposed to daylight. She was wise enough, or foolish enough, to believe this did not matter, that the form would present itself to her in the end.

Her dad never brought Phil and Lara back to the graveyard. He had buried some of her mother's things beneath a honeysuckle in the garden. A worn leather glove, a birthday card that she had written for each of them. The last photograph of the four of them together. There was a wisdom to what he had done; Lara saw it now. As the memory of her mother faded, the honeysuckle grew stronger. When Lara stood beneath it in summer, when it was in full bloom, her mother's sweetness seemed to live on in the scent of the flowers.

There was a little sketch pad with a pink paper cover, a packet of handwritten notes in what looked like my grandmother's handwriting, a silk scarf of water lilies on a blue background, a black fountain pen with an ornate silver hand on it, a book of poems by American poets with a number of pages dog-eared (I made a mental note to see if "Mending Wall" was in there), a magnifying glass with a carved wooden handle, a book called 'Native Flowers of New England' with a ragged cloth binding, another clothbound book called the 'Berry Farmer's Companion', and a stack of twenty faded black-and-white photographs.

If you do not know me, you whose presence is not even essential to me, it can only mean that this calendar has been badly printed. Your photographs on my walls and the bitter memories that our meetings have impressed upon my heart have only a paltry role in my love! You figure large in my dreams, ever-present, alone on the stage yet destitute of any role. I encounter you rarely on my path. I am of an age when one begins to contemplate one's emaciated fingers, and at which youth is so full, so real that it cannot be long before it begins to fade. Your lips bring tears to my eyes; you sleep naked in my brain and I dare not rest.

Sometimes, when I'm having a sort-through or a clear-out, I find photos of my youth, and it's a shock to see everything on black and white. I think my granddaughter believes we were actually grey-skinned, with dull hair, always posing in a shadowed landscape. But I remember the town as being almost too bright to look at when I was a girl. I remember the deep blue of the sky and the dark green of the pines cutting through it, the bright red of the local brick houses and the orange carpet of pine needles under our feet. Nowadays - though I'm not sure the sky is still occasionally blue and most of the houses are still there, and the trees still drop their needles - nowadays, the colours seem faded, as if I live in an old photograph.

The New York sidewalk led us along a little corner park rimmed with yellow-orange and violet pansies that seemed to be smiling, their faces upturned, and past a bagel shop that smelled of sesame and salt, delicious warm air. We passed an empty wine bar with a pink chandelier, whimsical and dim inside, and a neighborhood diner with its blue neon sign huge and lit up, little white line-cook hats—the city seemed in my vision like a multifaceted gem, spectacular. I wished I could keep everything I witnessed like a photograph, to forever hold this electric aliveness. The colors of the flowers and the clothing were crisp and rosy, hyper-bright against the subdued sun-drenched pigments of the streets and the brick buildings, all seeming faded, softer than real. Pops of coral and red—a scarf, a lady’s lips—were pops of life.

Mina: for centuries, I have been alone. I have nearly perished from loneliness, and yet I could not die. I have longed to meet a woman I could truly love: a kindred spirit who shared my dreams, my interests, my passions. When I saw your photograph and read your letters, I had an uncanny premonition that you were destined for me; and once we met, I knew it with a certainty." His eyes and voice blazed with such passion that all the fear and rancor that had built up within me began to fade away, evaporating like the very mist which had brought him here. He went on: "From the moment I set eyes on you on that first day at Whitby, I have wanted you- needed you- loved you. But I did not just want you for your blood: I wanted all of you: your mind, your heart, your body, your soul. I wanted you to want me; to become mine of your own free will. The time we shared in Whitby was the sweetest of my existence.

The possibility of any nuclear explosion occurring as a result of an accident involving either impact or fire is virtually non-existent,” Secretary of Defense Wilson assured the public. His press release about the Genie didn’t mention the risk of plutonium contamination. It did note, however, that someone standing on the ground directly beneath the high-altitude detonation of a Genie would be exposed to less radiation than “a hundredth of a dose received in a standard (medical) X-ray.” To prove the point, a Genie was set off 18,000 feet above the heads of five Air Force officers and a photographer at the Nevada test site. The officers wore summer uniforms and no protective gear. A photograph, taken at the moment of detonation, shows that two of the men instinctively ducked, two shielded their eyes, and one stared upward, looking straight at the blast. “It glowed for an instant like a newborn sun,” Time magazine reported, “then faded into a rosy, doughnut-shaped cloud.

So the days passed into weeks and the weeks into months, and gradually she too faded until many years later when I came across a photograph of us together on a hillside in Greece, our only holiday. A photograph I'd long forgotten tumbled from its envelope carrying the perfume of her after all those years. That perfume! It would be on the pillow, on my shirt, in every room. Now I breathed it in and was back among the cypresses of a monastery in Greece. We had walked for hours to the garden above the sea. We were given minted honey and yogurt and cool retsina by a young monk. Evening came and it was time to return to the hotel. She asked if we could stay in the monastery and the young monk said yes. And in an ancient stone cell, she fell asleep. I lay awake listening to her soft breathing. A bone in her foot cracked. A tiny cry in the throat. Even the chanting of the monks in the early morning did not wake her. And now there was only this photograph, the ghost of her smiling at me in the shade of cypress trees.

Ladies and gentlemen!” A loud, brash male voice rose above the din in the bar; it was bellowing and unmistakable. “May I have your attention, please!” Abe’s stomach tightened into a ball. After more than twenty years of listening to absurd nonsequiturs being bandied about during lulls in the office by the same voice, Abe knew who was speaking in an instant. His longtime business partner, CS Duffy, clad in his standard black Carhartt hooded sweatshirt and faded blue jeans, a Milwaukee Brewers cap on his head, was standing on a chair holding up his private investigator’s license folio as if it was some sort of officious piece of federal ID. “My name is Dr. Herbert Manfred Marx. I am with the CDC. We have an emergency situation.” The bar quieted nearly to silence. Abe started to move toward his partner. He had no idea what Duff was planning to say or do, but he knew it wouldn’t be good. Duff looked around the room, taking the time to make eye contact with the dozens of concerned speed daters. “The CDC has isolated a new form of sexually transmitted disease. We are calling it Mega-Herpes Complex IX. It is highly contagious and may result in your genitals exploding off your bodies in much the same way some lizards eject their own tails to confuse pursuing predators.” There were a few gasps from some of the women in the room and a round of confused murmurs. Duff continued unfazed. He unfurled a large, unflattering photocopy of an old photograph of Abe’s face. “We believe we have tracked Patient Zero to this location. If you see this man, for the love of God, do not sleep with him!” Abe walked up to Duff, grabbed his sleeve, and yanked him off the chair. Duff landed heavily. “Hey, Patient Zero! Good to see you.

With or without the Chinese, Calcutta was dead. Partition had deprived it of half its hinterland and burdened it with a vast dispirited refugee population. Even Nature had turned: the Hooghly was silting up. But Calcutta’s death was also of the heart. With its thin glitter, its filth and overpopulation, its tainted money, its exhaustion, it held the total Indian tragedy and the terrible British failure. Here the Indo-British encounter had at one time promised to be fruitful. Here the Indian renaissance had begun: so many of the great names of Indian reform are Bengali. But it was here, too, that the encounter had ended in mutual recoil. The cross-fertilization had not occurred, and Indian energy had turned sour. Once Bengal led India, in ideas and idealism; now, just forty years later, Calcutta, even to Indians, was a word of terror, conveying crowds, cholera and corruption. Its aesthetic impulses had not faded – there was an appealing sensibility in every Bengali souvenir, every over-exploited refugee ‘craft’ – but they, pathetically, threw into relief the greater decay. Calcutta had no leaders now, and apart from Ray, the film director, and Janah, the photographer, had no great names. It had withdrawn from the Indian experiment, as area after area of India was withdrawing, individual after individual. The British, who had built Calcutta, had ever been withdrawn from their creation; and they survived. Their business houses still flourished in Chownringhee; and to the Indians, products of the dead Indian renaissance, who now sat in some of the air-conditioned offices, Independence had meant no more than this: the opportunity to withdraw, British-like, from India. What then was the India that was left, for which one felt such concern? Was it no more than a word, an idea?

Only with Clara did she allow herself the luxury of giving in to her overwhelming desire to serve and be loved; with her, however slyly, she was able to express the secret, most delicate yearnings of her soul. The long years of solitude and unhappiness had distilled her emotions and purified her feelings down to a few terrible, magnificent passions, which possessed her totally. She had no gift for small perturbations, mean-spirited resentments, concealed envies, works of charity, faded endearments, ordinary friendly politeness, or day-to-day acts of kindness. She was one of those people who are born for the greatness of a single love, for exaggerated hatred, for apocalyptic vengeance, and for the most sublime forms of heroism, but she was unable to shape her fate to the dimensions of her amorous vocation, so it was lived out as something flat and gray trapped between her mother’s sickroom walls, wretched tenements, and the tortured confessions with which this large, opulent, hot-blooded woman—made for maternity, abundance, action, and ardor—was consuming herself She was about forty-five years old then, and her splendid breeding and distant Moorish ancestors kept her looking fit and polished, with black, silky hair and a single white lock on her forehead, a strong and slender body and the resolute step of the healthy. Still, the emptiness of her life made her look far older than she was. I have a photograph of Ferula taken around that time, on one of Blanca’s birthdays. It is an old sepiatoned picture, discolored with age, but you can still see how she looked. She was a regal matron, but with a bitter smile on her face that revealed her inner tragedy. Those years with Clara were probably the only happy period in her life, because only with Clara could she be herself Clara was the one in whom she confided her most subtle feelings, and to her she consecrated her enormous capacity for sacrifice and veneration.

The female diver continued to peel off the wet suit. Was Sam the only one who noticed? "And, Rachel, I don't believe you've met Sam." "No. No, I haven't. But I've heard great things about him." The diver flashed a million-watt smile as she slipped out of the wet suit. The conservative black maillot swimsuit beneath wasn't worth a damn at hiding what the wet suit had covered up. Sam's throat went dry and there was a humming sound behind his ears. Venus had risen from the sea, not in a shell, but in neon yellow and black neoprene. Green eyes seemed to assess him, as he stepped forward to take the hand she offered. Winter and the photographer faded away entirely. Please, please, please, he silently begged, don't be Winter's wife.

Beneath it hung a faded photograph in an Oxford frame. It presented a Victorian gentleman wearing an ineffable air of hauteur and a costume which suggested that he had begun to dress up as Mr. Sherlock Holmes but, suddenly losing interest, had gone out fishing instead.

But the limp tent sputtering to life transfixes Thaddeus. It morphs and undulates like a lava flow. Forms rise in the fabric only to collapse as the gas reaches toward equilibrium. "It's just the wind," Cheryl says, but he ignores her. His home is turmoil. Right now poison pours over Cheryl's clothes and into Stevie's old room. Next will be the garage, or would that have been first? Ultimately, the order matters little to him. Gas will eventually coil around everything like a cat settling down for a nap: his law books in the attic, the photograph in the family room of Stevie leaning over the rail at Niagara Falls pretending to slip, the Hawaiian leis from a family vacation he can't quite remember, entire drawers full of odd knickknacks and fading memorabilia that attest to a life well lived, tangible proof of memories made even if the memories themselves rise more sluggishly and infrequently than they used to—all of it, ultimately, choking on gas. But how many of the termites?

Yeah, well, I--” He stops and his eyes shift behind me, wide in amusement. I turn my head to find a couple straight out of the 1980s at the end of the gelato line. They’re both sporting mullets and faded jeans. White sneakers. When I notice the matching red fanny packs, I have to look away. “You should take a picture of that,” he says, resting his forearms on the table. “What?” I lean in closer and speak just above a whisper. “No way.” “Do it!” he insists. “Five euros.” He digs into his pocket and clanks down five coins. I sneak a peek at the unsuspecting couple. The man is wiping sweat off his face with a hanky. They’re too close. I’d never get away with it. “I can’t,” I say. “Pansy.” With a grunt, I switch my camera on and set it to automatic. I raise it to my face and start to twist my upper body. “No, wait!” he says. “You’re doing it wrong.” I drop the camera to my lap and face him. “What?” “You’re too obvious. You need stealth. Watch and learn.” He retrieves a small point-and-shoot camera from his pocket and aims it toward me. “Say cheese!” he says so loudly that I’m sure everyone around us is looking. “Uh…cheese?” “Done.” He hits a few buttons and shows me the display screen. There they are. Looked right at him too. Clever. But I can’t let him win. “Wow. That’s pretty pixelated. What kind of setting do you have that on?” He frowns. “It’s just zoomed in.” “Oh.” I reach to zoom out, but he pulls it away too fast. “What? Why can’t I see? Did you actually take a picture of me or something?” “Stealth.” He shrugs and my cheeks turn pink. “Guess these are my winnings.” The coins scrape across the table as he scoops them up to put in his pocket. “You didn’t even give me a chance to redeem myself,” I defend. “Excuses, excuses. Just admit I’m the better photographer.” He laughs, standing to shoot his empty cup in the trash. “Finished?” I nod and he tosses mine too. “Braver maybe, but better? Your camera doesn’t have enough buttons.

Among other jobs that we did, my brother Bill and I were shoe shine boys in Jersey City and Hoboken during the World War II years. We went from tavern to tavern shining shoes for ten cents and hopefully a generous tip. The Hoboken waterfront bristled with starkly looming, grey hulled Liberty ships. Secured to the piers facing River Street, they brandished their ominous cannons towards what I thought was City Hall. An unappreciated highlight was when I shined Frank Sinatra’s shoes at a restaurant on Washington Street, just west from the Clam Broth House. There was no doubt but that Hoboken was an exciting place during those years. Years later I met Frank at Jilly's saloon, a lounge on West 52d Street in Manhattan, for a few drinks and a little fun around town. Even though I was an adult by then, he still called me “kid!” It was obvious that Frank Sinatra enjoyed friendly relations with Mafia notables such as Carlo Gambino, “Joe Fish” Fischetti and Sam Giancana. Meyer Lansky was said to have been a friend of Sinatra’s parents in Hoboken. During this time Sinatra spoke in awe about Bugsy Siegel and was in an AP syndicated photograph, seen in many newspapers, with Tommy “Fatso” Marson, Don Carlo Gambino 'The Godfather', and Jimmy 'The Weasel, Fratianno. Little wonder that the Federal Bureau of Investigation kept their eye on Sinatra for almost 50 years. A memo in FBI files revealed that Sinatra felt that he could be of use to them. However, it is difficult to believe that Sinatra would have become an FBI informer, better known as a “rat.” It was in May of 1998 when Sinatra, being treated at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles told his wife Barbara, “I’m losing.” Frank Sinatra died on May 14th at 82 years of age. It is alleged that he was buried with the wedding ring from his ex-wife, Mia Farrow, which she slid unnoticed into his suit pocket during his “viewing.” Aside from his perceived personal and public image, Frank Sinatra’s music will shape his enduring legacy for decades to come. His 100th birthday was celebrated at the Hollywood Bowl on Wednesday, July 22, 2015. Somehow Frank will never age and his music will never fade….

It was uncomfortable to think of her memories just…fading away, like old photographs. Ephemeral. Things always felt so real when you were there with your hands on them. But memory was as weak and fragile as paper, and as easily destroyed or manipulated.

Sometimes we found photographs of beautiful young girls, or handsome young men. There were pictures of old men, who looked like apostles, and old ladies with faded smiles. In some, one could see children playing in a park, babies crying, or newlyweds kissing. On the reverse of these were some farewells, oaths, or religious passages scribbled in handwriting obviously shaken by fear or the motion of the train. The words were often washed off by the morning dew or bleached out by the sun.

He bent over, flipped open the brass clasps. It had been decades since he’d seen her, so long, in fact, that he sometimes wondered if that time had been imagined. But when he took out the black and white photograph, marred and fading, beneath his old military uniform, it was if it had all happened a few days before.  

I continue opening boxes. I find more faded and cracked photographs than I ever want to see. I find many engraved invitations to the weddings of people who are no longer married. I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.

Yet all of his memories were fading like old photographs.

I came across an Etruscan word, saeculum, which is a concept, or marker, of a temporal interval. Generally speaking, it is the span of time lived by the oldest person present. The day will come…when the last person to have fought in Vietnam will die. . . .Who will remember when . . . a car had to be cranked to start or when the clank of an ice delivery man carrying fifty-pound block in tongs brought merriment to the afternoon? I wonder, then, what would be my saeculum. Or whom. I wonder what young nephew or niece’s child, siphoned through the tunnel of time, would see a faded photograph of me and search their memories for my name. I think he was some sort of great-uncle, she or he will say. I don’t remember exactly. Look at his clothes!

The optical unconscious remains elusive. This concept is not something that is directly available to sight, but it nevertheless informs and influences what comes into view. By attending to this idea, one might become newly aware of previously unnoticed details and dynamics, as well as the material, social, and psychic structures that shape perception. In several of his books, the British psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas described this disavowed dimension as the "unthought known." This refers to material that is either emotionally undigested or actively barred from consciousness." As Bollas teaches us, this "unthought" material is, in fact, an integral part of knowledge. And indeed, it seems photography may be one of the principal means to circulate this unconscious material that remains vexingly obscure. Like latent memories, details of photographic information snap into focus and become visible in unpredictable moments. As Benjamin put it, they"flash up" in moments of danger and desire - and they can quickly fade from view unless seized in a moment of recognition.

It occurs to me that in the year Shunkin's picture was taken—when she was thirty-six—Sasuke himself became blind; the last time he saw her she must have looked rather like this. Was the picture of her which he carried in his memory in old age as faded as this photograph? Or did his imagination make up for a gradually failing memory? Did he create an image of another lovely woman, of one altogether different from the woman in the photograph?

After tea [Nanny Ripeka] began to tell me the old photographs, which I already knew, fading on every wall. Tell me who they were and what they were to me. Then she told me of the ones before that, who were not on the walls but whom she had known. Then back before that to the ones she had never known or seen. And her voice that had been slow at the beginning and thoughtful began to chant out the ancient names coming from far back, so I could know them. I was beginning to know them because I had heard them many times before. Beginning to know, yet knowing there was more to understand.

Our memories from early childhood are far from indelible; they fade until, by our late teens, if not before, they are like yellowed photographs from a previous century.

He was thinking about men like his Uncle Ted, a Cornishman to his bones, who lived and would die in St. Mawes, part of the fabric of the place, remembered as long as there were locals, beaming out of fading photographs of the Life Boat on pub walls. When Ted died—and Strike hoped it would be twenty, thirty years hence—they would mourn him as the unknown Barrovian Grammar boy was being mourned: with drink, with tears, but in celebration that he had been given to them. What had dark, hulking Brockbank, child rapist, and fox-haired Laing, wife-torturer, left behind in the towns of their birth? Shudders of relief that they had gone, fear that they had returned, a trail of broken people and bad memories.

And maybe that’s all love ever was—just something you hung over loneliness, like a photograph put up just to cover a square of faded paint on a wall.

Polaroid vs. Digital Photos [10w] Photographs nowadays are preserved forever, it's the people who fade.

a young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses

My photographic memory faded and couldn’t make the transition to digital.

Patrick Jephson As the first and only private secretary to Diana during her life, Patrick Jephson was one of the closest people to the Princess throughout her international charity and diplomatic career. He is also a notable broadcaster and journalist and has contributed to many major British newspapers, including the Times, the Observer, and the Daily Mail. His writing credits include Shadows of a Princess and Portraits of a Princess: Travels with Diana, and several of his books have been international bestsellers. As a nation, the British like to remember things, especially things that make them feel special. Trying to forget Diana is a tall order--and not just for those of us who knew her well. What happened to her during those sixteen years was drama on a Shakespearean scale--just think of love, betrayal, sacrifice, beauty, and death. The curtain may have come down on the tragedy ten years ago. But our farewell to Diana is not yet complete. It probably never will be. It’s a memory that is renewed each time we see a photograph of her sons. William in particular carries the blessing (or the burden) of Diana’s camera-friendly looks. Her DNA in our future heads of state is now an ineradicable biological fact. Time may fade that reality. But nobody can deny it.

Someday Tatiana must tell Alexander how glad she is that her sister Dasha did not die without once feeling what it was like to love. Alexander. Here he is, before he was Tatiana’s, at the age of twenty, getting his medal of valor for bringing back Yuri Stepanov during the 1940 Winter War. Alexander is in his dress Soviet uniform, snug against his body, his stance at-ease and his hand up to his temple in teasing salute. There is a gleaming smile on his face, his eyes are carefree, his whole man-self full of breathtaking, aching youth. And yet, the war was on, and his men had already died and frozen and starved... and his mother and father were gone... and he was far away from home, and getting farther and farther, and every day was his last—one way or another, every day was his last. And yet, he smiles, he shines, he is happy. Anthony is gone so long that his daughters say something must have happened to him. But then he appears. Like his father, he has learned well the poker face and outwardly remains imperturbable. Just as a man should be, thinks Tatiana. A man doesn’t get to be on the President’s National Security Council without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. A man doesn’t go through what Anthony went through without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. In this hand Anthony carries two faded photographs, flattened by the pages of the book, grayed by the passing years. The kitchen falls quiet, even Rachel and Rebecca are breathless in anticipation. “Let’s see...” they murmur, gingerly picking up the fragile, sepia pictures with their long fingers. Tatiana is far away from them. “Do you want to see them with us, Grammy? Grandpa?” “We know them well,” Tatiana says, her voice catching on something. “You kids go ahead.” The grandchildren, the daughter, the son, the guests circle their heads, gaping. “Washington, look! Just look at them! What did we tell you?” Shura and Tania, 23 and 18, just married. In full bloom, on the steps of the church near Lazarevo, he in his Red Army dress uniform, she in her white dress with red roses, roses that are black in the monochrome photo. She is standing next to him, holding his arm. He is looking into the camera, a wide grin on his face. She is gazing up at him, her small body pressed into him, her light hair at her shoulders, her arms bare, her mouth slightly parted. “Grammy!” Rebecca exclaims. “I’m positively blushing. Look at the way you’re coming the spoon on Grandpa!” She turns to Alexander from the island. “Grandpa, did you catch the way she is looking at you?” “Once or twice,” replies Alexander. The other colorless photo. Tania and Shura, 18 and 23. He lifts her in the air, his arms wrapped around her body, her arms wrapped around his neck, their fresh faces tilted, their enraptured lips in a breathless open kiss. Her feet are off the ground. “Wow, Grammy,” murmurs Rebecca. “Wow, Grandpa.” Tatiana is busily wiping the granite island. “You want to know what my Washington said about you two?” Rebecca says, not looking away from the photograph. “He called you an adjacent Fibonacci pair!” She giggles. “Isn’t that sexy?” Tatiana shakes her head, despite herself glancing at Washington with reluctant affection. “Just what we need, another math expert. I don’t know what you all think math will give you.” And Janie comes over to her father who is sitting at the kitchen table, holding her baby son, bends over Alexander, leans over him, kisses him, her arm around him, and murmurs into his ear, “Daddy, I’ve figured out what I’m going to call my baby. It’s so simple.” “Fibonacci?” She laughs. “Why, Shannon, of course. Shannon.” The

There were four at first but within ten minutes the group was standing witnessing a display of fifteen fully formed whirlwinds of solid white towering over them to heights of approximately twenty five feet. It was easy to see how a phenomenon like this, viewed in the right lighting might give an observer the impression that they were witnessing a supernatural occurrence. The whirlwinds were sustained by the eerie windstorm for a full hour, never fading or faltering;in fact, a few more tornadoes were formed during that time. They watched in complete fascination, stopping only to take photographs and record video of what they were seeing. When the wind subsided, Xenia looked at the sky.

A flustered photographer in the great Eurotrash tradition hurried over to their perch. He had a goatee and spiky blond hair like Sandy Duncan on an off day. Bathing did not appear to be a priority here. He sighed repeatedly, making sure all in the vicinity knew that he was both important and being put out. “Where is Brenda?” he whined. “Right here.” Myron swiveled toward a voice like warm honey on Sunday pancakes. With her long, purposeful stride—not the shy-girl walk of the too-tall or the nasty strut of a model—Brenda Slaughter swept into the room like a radar-tracked weather system. She was very tall, over six feet for sure, with skin the color of Myron’s Starbucks Mocha Java with a hefty splash of skim milk. She wore faded jeans that hugged deliciously but without obscenity and a ski sweater that made you think of cuddling inside a snow-covered log cabin. Myron

She handed him an old class photograph, the color not so much fading as greening from age. Fifteen kids flanked by two teachers, one a far younger Peggy Joyce. The years had not been unkind to her, but they’d passed anyway.

April 19, 2001, and were met by Mr. Minasian at the railroad station in Nuremberg. We had talked for a year, for hours at a time, and now we met in person. On the morning of the day before the premiere we were received at the theater. There was a crowd: actors, musicians, the press, radio and TV reporters. That was the only time in my life that I was interviewed in German. Fortunately it worked out well. On the following day, the day of the premiere (which was only open to invited guests and the press), a long article, with photographs, appeared in the Fürth newspaper. It was a wonderful performance, on an open stage with musicians all around and the composer at the piano. The writer's wife, Katharina Teuffert, played Selma.

Yuda was in familiar surroundings, yet he had no parents, he did not know whether his brother Michael was alive. He didn't invite any of his friends because the aunt's apartment was much too small to accommodate more than the group assembled. Two days after the wedding, we went to a photographer and had a picture taken of the two of us, so as to send my family a wedding picture, to let them see what my husband looked like. I think we made a good, loving, devoted couple. We created a family, we had two fine sons within the following four years.

The ceilings soared up fifteen feet at least, holding nothing but stale air and the faded echoes of hard-soled shoes and clacking keys. The whole place was a lost black-and-white photograph.

If we direct our intention toward doing (when possible) that which seems meaningful right now and noticing that any outcome is enough, we might discover a terribly obvious yet effective strategy for perpetual contentment. Of course to do this—to open ourselves up to changing and living according to the meaning of the present month or moment—is a frightening proposition. If we do, we will surely witness our tastes and whims recycle and transform. We will watch as our personalities modify in subtle ways. And although a small number of passions might stay with us throughout our lives, many more will certainly fall away or be replaced. In other words, to admit that in this second I am not a static being is to admit that I will be something different tomorrow, something unknown a year from now, and possibly something unrecognizable to myself in a decade. This notion is uncomfortable because it forces us to countenance the passing of time, the fading of past selves, our eventual physical death. To change is to vacate the past and move ever-closer to the end of our story. It’s no wonder that we bury our proverbial talons in the interests, attributes, memories, and tendencies of our past selves and insist that “who we are” has long been established. But what might we become if we accept that, in the grammar of the universe, our nature is verb-like, transitory, ever-moving? We might become anything. The possibilities are endless and exciting. It seems natural to hold tightly onto the past. We tend to feel that if don’t have the past, we don’t have anything. Our pasts provide all of the context with which we are equipped to navigate the present. Without our memories and stories, we would indeed be directionless and alone. But it seems that we often overcompensate, desperately clinging to the “good old days”, trying to relive them in our minds, and simultaneously attempting to freeze the present moment, to capture the past before it becomes the past. This latter point can be plainly observed in our modern tendency to photograph even the most mundane of moments and to record hours of video that we’ll never revisit. But if we spend significant amounts of time trying to immortalize and live vicariously through the past, we may relinquish a measure of ability to see the possibilities of the present and future. We may cease to fully capitalize on the surrounding opportunities for novel experience, reflection, and appreciation. We may eschew the potential to become a marvelously different-yet-somehow-still-the-same version of ourselves.

Photographs, like ghosts, are the persistence of memory. Over time, people fade from our recollection, or change. Their faces become kinder or more cruel, their hair less gray or more so. But photographs carry the truth, if only one small piece of it.

Tell me something, my love, where is your rose, where is your love, what time is it in your world? Tell me something, where is the photograph of the child that you were, where does the past become the future, at what moment does the dawn cease to be the dawn, at what time does the white rose change into your rose, at what hour does the rose of your world fade? Tell me something, my love, why do I have to keep on remembering you, why do I have to keep on living, why do I have to keep on dying for you, what is the time in your life, what is the time in my life, where do we meet, where do we lose each other? Why is it that I can never find you, why is it that I can never forget you, why is it that your memory is always here, tormenting me, haunting me, like a ghost that will never leave me alone?

Voices fade, photographs are just tricks of lights and mirrors, and touch is a passing phantom. But scent lingers, and even long after the last particle of someone’s essence is gone, the faintest smell can bring all the memories rushing back.

However loss comes, it hurts. We all identify with the pain of loss. We have all lost people we once hugged and held and allowed a kind of merging of us with them. And whether they walked away, moved away, drifted away, shoved away, faded away, or passed away, the awayness created a phantom feeling where, out of habit, we reach for them but they’re no longer there. We dial their number to no avail. We run our fingers across photographs but cannot feel the warmth of their skin. The loss of inside jokes and shared late-night whispers and conflicts and carpools and cookouts and differing opinions and all the other million little daily ways “together” is made. The story of our lives included us both. And now it doesn’t. This is loss. Loss is maddening. Loss is shrinking. Loss is reducing.

Memory is not an analog photograph that fades. Memory is a house, a castle with many rooms. Some of the rooms are deeper inside, honeycombed away. Each has a thousand keys—an image, a smell, a sound. Behind each door is a thousand other doors.

London is fortunate to have an abundance of 'ghost signs', the faded remnants of businesses that remind us of what came before.

Because those moments had been enabled by a future that had never arrived, they could not be remembered from this future that, at and as the present, had obtained; they’d faded from the photograph.

Darkened Light by Stewart Stafford Ephemeral life fading, As a ground shadow, The cat in the shade, The sun's arm draped. Pose for a photograph, Thousand-yard stare, In denial of expiration, That bodily eviction. Take a breather inside, Too drained for more, Crash and burn out, Let quietus wash over. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

The past is fading, like an old photograph, and as hard as I try, there's nothing I can do to stop it.

He wondered if every criminal saw himself as the hero of his own story, and if every thankless son was convinced he’d been mistreated by his father. Nothing was constant, he understood that now. Even Moses Levy’s photographs of the trees in the forest were shifting, fading from the very light that had created them. And in that hour of dim morning light, Eddie admitted that he no longer understood who he was, a hero, a nobody, a thief, a son who’d been mistreated, or one who had wronged his father so profoundly he might never be forgiven.

Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually the specificity of the photographs' accusations will fade; the denunciation of particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer's intentions are irrelevant to this larger process.