The past is lost. The photo is a splinter of memory, out of time and always out of place. A photo captures a moment and arrests it within the onlooker’s gaze. It extends the fragmentary and in doing so becomes a fragment itself. The photo is not the past, merely a simulacrum of it. To archive is to search. To pursue the complete, the absolute, the total and most of all the truth. There is a dream within the public imagination, the means of the capitalist and aims of the archivist. The simple will yield itself from the complex, if only the enlightened can possess enough. The archive is a place to sculpt ourselves out of our ancestors, to imagine a future born out of the past. The archive is valuable and filled with the potential for beauty not because it is the truth, but because it is a place ripe for invention and reinvention.
