A note to the woman in the photograph (fragment from my essay, Shutter Release, which is on its way through the postal system as I type, except of course I end up revising a bit here - cannot resist):
I want light like Lucretius imagined it. Sight like Leucippus. I want the surfaces of things - and of people - to flit off into the atmosphere and float: to the eye, to the camera lens, to photo paper. To adhere.
If light were a faint film of you - peeled away like a sticker or fruit skin - it would adhere to the photo paper, haunting the Polaroid, a two dimensional ghost. I could dig into the photo and scrape a sample from your miniature cheek, yank out a tiny hair, extract your DNA.
I could pull you right out of the image of you.
I could pick the dirt and skin and food from under your nails and see what and who you last touched. I could pry out a paper tooth and see if it matched the radiographs on file under your name.
(And in this reality, last seen is synonymous with last touched.)
But that would mean: cutting you into pieces. Like the forensic artist disarticulating a skull to make a sculpture, I would have to do real damage, all for the chance to know your name.
And like the archaeologist, I would have to destroy the site, rendering it useless to future digs.