Dividing time into Past, Present, and Future suggests that reality is distributed equally among three parts, but in fact the past is the most real of all. The future is, inevitably, an accumulation of loss, and dying is something we all do in our lives.

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

Time eventually positions most photographs, even the most amateurish, at the level of art.