Why should things last forever?

Because the idea that they should is younger than we think. It is an inheritance from the sixties and seventies — a time that genuinely believed a good chair, a good camera, a good marriage would simply endure. Then the markets arrived and shattered it. We mourn that, and we are right to. But underneath the mourning there is a question worth asking honestly: why should a thing last forever? What if the lifespan of an object is not a measure of its quality but a separate decision entirely?

That is the tension I live in. A portrait holds a face still — but the person walks out of the studio and keeps ageing, which is exactly as it should be. The photograph is not the person; it is a moment the person agreed to lend me. I have stopped trying to make pictures that defeat time. I try to make pictures that are honest about it.

I see no adversary here, only a companion — ein Gefährte. The machine is a tool, the way the camera was a tool and the darkroom was a tool. It does not breathe, it does not feel, it does not see. Those stay with us: breathing, feeling, seeing, the thought, and the asking. What it does is shorten the distance between a question and a draft. That is not a threat to slowness. It is more room for it, if you choose to use the room that way.

The memory the thing connects to. We are always, in fact, using a technique to reach a memory. Think of Proust and the cake — it is never just a cake again. The print will fade. The recognition it triggers can outlive the paper by a generation. That is the durable thing, and I don't get to manufacture it. I can only make room for it.