A Sense of Absence

With many people showing interest in my post If Walls Could Talk, Concrete Confess, I thought I would reblog this post about why I love old photographs, but also why they haunt me. This is the last reblog, I promise. Tomorrow-something fresh.

City Jackdaw

Old photographs. I love old photographs, the older the better.

I love them, but I am haunted by the people in them.

I am not talking about spirits or spectres.

What it is that haunts me is a sense of absence.

The absence of the people in the photographs themselves-the fact that they are no longer here with us, their energy and essence now gone, creating a vacuum where they once took up space.

But it is not just an absence of the people that haunts me.

I am haunted also by the absence of resolution.

In most cases our questions remain unanswered, we will never know who these people were, what was in store for them after these photographs were taken. Did they go on to have good lives? Were their lives a success, or a struggle? Did they escape the squalor? Do their lines continue down to us…

View original post 698 more words