Memento Mori (Week 10)

Susan Sontag said, and I'm not quoting her here, that mortality haunts a photograph, that they are a memento mori, that taking a photograph participates in our mortality and documents in the relentless march of time. Similarly though, in taking a photograph, you capture a moment, and subsequently time. So do you not capture that moment for eternity, or however long the photograph or negative of jpeg exists? The archivist of Photograph of the Day, he is dead, yet I felt that I was with him, at least in the capacity of a passive observer when I went through his photos. His body is gone, but he is not. His moments, his experiences, his ideas, the things he felt important are all contained in his archive. It is not an archive of a person's photographs but of a person. It is his story of life and death. It was a wise decision to refrain from adding contextual information, because it would have put a filter between the viewer and the man. The photographs do not passively represent the life either, they actively shaped his life as a daily event that had to happen come hell or high water, they were the structure to his life at some level, keel that kept him from drifting, something that he could look forward to each day.