The thing that astonishes me about photography is the proof it seems to provide that the past was real. I should never, ever have thought that was the case were it not for photography, my own memories appear so much as dream images to me. They crystallize, like Stendhal’s twigs pulled from the salt mines encrusted with diamonds, until I cannot be sure that they were real. Whatever led scientists to pick, out of the vast spectrum of possible explanations for memory, out of the fairies and gods, the view that memory is just the lasting impression made by light upon the brain?