ABSTRACT
The fundamental motive for the vast majority of picture making
is the impulse to preserve — to document and therefore commemo-
rate specifi c people and events of importance. Artists use images
expressionistically to articulate and conceptualize who they are and
what they think of the world. Others make pictures for commercial
reasons, while some create informational systems or visualize the
unseen with scientifi c imaging. Regardless of purpose, they all make
photographs because words cannot always provide a satisfactory way
to describe and express our relationship to the world. Pictures are an
essential component of how humans observe, communicate, cele-
brate, comment, express, and, most of all, remember. What and how
we remember shapes our worldview, and photographs can provide
the stimulus to jog one’s memory. Poet Billy Collins sums up this
human process of memory, and indirectly the importance of images
as keepers of the fl ame, in his poem Forgetfulness:
The name of the author is the fi rst to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of . . .
