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.