Optique

Each moving story featured in this collection pivots around an intense emotional relationship with a photograph, spanning a century and a half of images--from daguerreotype to digital. From drugstore-developed snapshots to formal portraits, the subjects of the pictures are all absent people, obsessively pursued through a viewfinder of unsettling prose. Potential lovers separate after the discovery of harsh pornography on a camera's memory card. A man drowns as his sister watches through the crystal-clear ice of a frozen river; his last act is to look at the photograph of his son he keeps in his breast pocket. A soldier has a daguerreotypist make a double exposure of him in his dead twin's uniform so their mother will think they are both alive. Ultimately each image and story reaffirms the eternal capacity of the photograph--and photography's splendid consort, light--to expose the intricacies of the human soul.