Emblems of the Passing World

But even as I pondered these dilemmas—if you pluck a special moment from life and frame it, are you defying death, decay, and the passage of time or are you submitting to it?—I grew very bored with them.

What a world, Sadie thought. People once made glass sculptures of decay, and they put these sculptures in museums. How strange and beautiful human beings are. And how fragile.

Photography is inescapably a memorial art. It selects, out of the flow of time, a moment to be preserved, with the moments before and after falling away like sheer cliffs.