Convergence on Market Street, San Francisco | Mark Lindsay
I work a lot with old snapshots. Some are found and rescued. Others come from old family albums. Snapshots are pure magic, the essence of wizardry. They are windows into a world that does not quite exist. We were not born with the ability to see time in a frozen state. Yet, the snapshot stops everything forever, or at least until the photo disintegrates to dust.
While the snapshot evokes memories of past events, old lovers, and dusty emotions, there is one aspect of the photo that fascinates me like no other. There are often people who show up in these photos that were not meant to be there. Or so the story goes. These people are seemingly random visitors to the snapshot dimension. The come into this one moment of our life, their likeness frozen, and then they are gone forever.
But, they live eternally in that one moment. They haunt us, make us wonder who they are, what they are doing, where they are going. Years later, we take out the photo and they are still there, still frozen, still captured within the four corners of the frame. They are secret voyagers in our life, silent mysteries of convergence.
In old photos, everyone is dead. This makes the secret voyagers all the more fascinating. But, even when they show up in photos made this morning, they are still reminders of past times. A morning gone forever, a person who we never knew. An eternal reminder of all that is unknown.