fiction: Man, standing in background.

I have no photograph albums: there could only be blank pages filled with all the pictures I have never taken. There is another collection, however, that exists in the form of a ghost. It is the collection of all the photographs I have taken of other people with their own cameras, souvenirs of the times I have been stopped in the street by strangers, standing in front of tourist attractions, perhaps, or sitting grouped in some bar or cafe. It is is scattered across the globe in the homes of others, sometimes treasured, sometimes lying forgotten in a drawer.

All of them, I fear, have the stilted framing of snapshots everywhere. Though I have sometimes been tempted by gestures of radical artistic statement — portraits that decapitate people at the neck, leaving their lower bodies to gesture at the scenery behind them, pictures snatched at the moment the subject turns away, thinking it all over — I have never been brave enough. At most squatting down to capture the full height of a building or directing people out of shadow. Even so, I hope they all bear at least the lightest trace of myself.

Sometimes on quiet evenings I comfort myself with the thought I might be remembered in a place I will never visit — the invisible adjunct to a happy memory. I wonder, too, if I have ever been noticed in this collection's fainter kissing cousins — all those photographs in which I appear as an unbidden extra: the passerby chancing to step into the frame just as the shutter fell; man, standing in background.