The Nameless Ones

A camera is a window and through it a portion of the world waits to be discovered. But sometimes the world looks back. 

The photographer waits clandestine behind his memory trap, capturing faces, stealing souls. As innocent bystanders, we each get caught - a part of us is preserved someplace, in countless collections of vacation photos. We are rendered in our clothing, in our skin, in our trances. Our presences are recorded, our existences witnessed; unnamed. Hundreds and hundreds of stolen moments where we happen to be standing somewhere in front of that little window, in that little box that gathers lights and orders it precisely as it fell upon us. The energy that does not pass through us, the energy that is reflected back off of our bodies can be collected, kept, held fast. Long after we cease to exist as containers of energy, as physical vessels that reflect light, older reflections of ourselves will still remain somewhere, someplace. Our reflections will far outlive ourselves. Has not, then, some version of an eternal life of the body been realized? 

It is always jarring to discover the stranger who catches us back. We, who feel so safe behind the lens, so crafty, so sly, don't always get away with the theft. The child above is not only aware of the camera, she is defiant of it. You will not catch me unguarded, she says. I see you there, hiding behind that lens. If you're going to enter my space, I am going to enter yours.

I will never know her name. I will never know what she may have been thinking in this random slice of time. I will never know if she had a good day or a good life. But I will not forget her. She won't remember me, but for years to come as I peruse my images, as I go through my photographs, I will occasionally see her again. There's that little girl in the window of House of Nanking, I will think. I wonder what she's doing? That is one of the great miracles of photography. Two lives connect. Two energies share a moment of sync. Vincent and Sarah. Vincent and Molly. Vincent and Chloe. Does a name even matter? Names aren't only reference points for tiny bundles of light.

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