Photography is a technology for visual memory, analogous in its cultural significance to the phonograph and aural memory.

Individual photographs are surely examples of ART in the sense that they are deliberate compositions: the photographer locates the subject in a frame and chooses a moment to open the shutter, thus committing the image to a technical process that captures the contents of the moment. Pictures are taken FOR posterity, and the photographer often has a specific audience in mind, but the images in this collection have been rescued from oblivion, and have found their way to a new and unanticipated posterity.

There are so many conjunctions of accident and chance, so many contingencies in even the most naive snapshot. Individual images often radiate poignancy when the viewer's attention is able to settle into prolonged engagement. One realizes that the photograph captures an instant in life, and is left to imagine backstory and upshot: how the wrinkles were earned, what the subject knew about the world, what meanings and messages descendants drew from the image, how the image ended up in a junk store, and what readings we can construct a century or so later.

This collection can be read in several different ways, according to the reader's predilections. The images are certainly historical documents, but possess granularity that defies precise contextualization. On the most literal parsing, one explores the presentation of self in vernacular photography and portraiture, as practised in snapshots and photography studios of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The images were made as personal tokens, meant for personal remembrance and distribution to family and friends. Nearly all are anonymous and mysterious: they mean SOMETHING, separately and collectively, but extracting meaning is a creative exercise. It may draw on history but must be rooted in conjecture, projection and imagination.

These vernacular images allow us to peek into Nova Scotia life that very few living people can remember. Tucked away in closets and attics there must be hundreds of such albums, and it's my fond hope that explorers of my collections will be inspired to make their own, and begin reading and retelling the stories they find within them.