When This You See, Remember Me 08

I am holding a little violin.

The real difference between the aura that a photograph can have and that of a painting lies in the different relation to time. The depredations of time tend to work against paintings. But part of the built-in interest of photographs, and a major source of their aesthetic value, is precisely the transformations that time works upon them, the way they escape the intentions of their makers. Given enough time, many photographs do acquire an aura. For while paintings or poems do not get better, more attractive simply because they are older, all photographs are interesting as well as touching if they are old enough.

-Susan Sontag, "On Photography"