Photographs help us retain memories and hang on to life in a sense, but they’re neither memories nor life. They’re only small pieces of the bigger puzzle–just shards, not fractals. From them we piece together a menagerie. The animals are crude, but they’re better than nothing, though not by nearly as much as we often believe. From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book Three:

It is the era we take photos of, not the people in it, they can’t be captured. Not even the people in my immediate circle can. Who was the woman posing in front of the stove in the flat in Thereses gate, wearing a light-blue dress, one knee resting against the other, calves apart, in this typical 1960s posture? The one with the bob? The blue eyes and the gentle smile that was so gentle that it barely even registered as a smile? The one holding the handle of the shiny coffee pot with the red lid? Yes, that was my mother, my very own mom, but who was she? What was she thinking? How did she see her life, the one she had lived so far and the one awaiting her? Only she knows, and the photo tells you nothing. An unknown woman in an unknown room, that is all. And the man who, ten years later, is sitting on a mountainside drinking coffee from the same red thermos top, as he forgot to pack any cups before leaving, who was he? The one with the well-groomed black beard and the thick black hair? The one with the sensitive lips and amused eyes? Yes, of course, that was my father, my very own dad. But who he was to himself at this moment, or at any other, nobody knows. And so it is with all these photos, even the ones of me. They are voids, the only meaning that can be derived from them is that which time has added.•

Everything is reality now, and everything is fake, too. It’s all exists in a purgatory state, hurting less but meaning less. We feel it all, briefly, and then it’s quickly replaced by more. From Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, Book 2: 

Death makes life meaningless because everything we have ever striven for ceases when life does, and it makes life meaningful, too, because its presence makes the little we have of it indispensable, every moment precious. But in my lifetime death has been removed from our lives, it no longer existed, except as a constant item in all the newspapers, on the TV news, and in films, where it didn’t mark the end of a process, discontinuity, but, on account of daily repetition, represented, on the contrary, an extension of the process, continuity, and in this way, oddly enough, had become a source of our security and our anchor. A plane crash was a ritual, it happened every so often, the same chain of events, and we were never part of it ourselves. A sense of security, but also excitement and intensity, for imagine how terrible the last seconds were for the passengers.•