Your observation, your acknowledgment, your intuition, your meditation is what will make art of it. Allow yourself that privilege. Become enveloped within each and every image until the air of the past is indistinguishable from the present and there begin your own journey. Backwards through time. Backwards through each and every change of hands. Backwards through adhesive snares in every photo album tenderly brought down from the shelf. Backwards through lives lost and now born and up until the very moment that the camera shutter snapped closed. Once you've arrived, unravel all that you can. As impossible as it may seem, go and uncover every buried secret that may lie beneath every detail now immortalized. Leave no speck of ink untouched before returning to where you now sit and know that even without names and without stories and without the memory of how the scrap metal or winter chill or fear of war or smell of dew felt, with a single photograph, the conduit through which existence may endure to the present is you.

Under your stewardship,
this proof of existence has life left to breathe.