Writing out Loud

Maybe there isn't any trouble with small monuments. As long as you can still see the exact size and importance of each particular one. Maybe you're allowed to remember, with appreciation and exactness, moments that meant something to you even if the persons or places being memorialized have, in partiality or totality, stopped being part of your current life. But that's the point! They are monuments to things lost!<----should be underlined but blogger doesn't seem to do that. And what is my collection of frames but things lost but worth, in one way or another, remembering? A time, a person, a place. Monuments aren't often built to celebrate something that is continuing to happen, no, it memorializes something that happened for a while (a minute, an hour, a day, a month, a year, a decade etc) and ended.


So the question becomes whether they are monuments to the moment of the photograph being taken or the person/people/places within it and what brought them to the image. There is a difference between the story of the photograph and the story of the people within it. And then there is the story of the decision to put the photograph in a frame. At which stage does a framed photograph become a monument? Ten years? The length of a relationship or friendship? The moment glossy paper hits glass?