When This You See, Remember Me 06

My father, Jerome, aged 16.

To look at an old photograph of oneself, of anyone one has known, or of a much photographed public person is to feel, first of all, how much younger I (she, he) was then. Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives, group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed, continued along the course of their independent destinies.

-Susan Sontag, "On Photography"