When This You See, Remember Me 09

My mother, seated, and her brother Daniel, about 1927. He would have been my uncle, but he was killed in a hunting accident when he was 18.

The lover's photograph hidden in a married woman's wallet, the poster photograph of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent's bed, the campaign-button image of a politician's face pinned on a voter's coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver's children clipped to the visor - all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality.

-Susan Sontag, "On Photography"