The day began with a resignation.
Nothing dramatic. Nobody overturned a table or told the CEO where to put the brand mission. Just an email, a few handshakes and a man who had spent years there becoming part of the past remarkably quickly.
By lunchtime, someone asked whether his chair was available. I probably would have done the same. The machine moves on.
He was gone, but his place still held something of him. Marks on the desk. The chair. A few objects left behind. Not the whole man, obviously. Not his childhood, his worries or the person his mother knew. Just a trace.
That is what interests me about images. They hold something after life has moved on.
A photograph does this quite obviously. The face of someone who died keeps appearing years later, with that strange calm of not knowing what came next. But a room can do it too. An object. A child's drawing on the fridge. A packet of biscuits from home, found in a foreign supermarket, can bring something back with a force wildly out of proportion to the price of the biscuits.
So when I say image, I don't just mean photography. I mean any form capable of holding something of an experience and returning it later. A face. A street. A body. A flag. A uniform. A product. An afternoon. A humiliation. A desire.
Something of life enters that form and remains available.
That is why I think of the image as a battery.
Let's not stretch the metaphor too far. Metaphors become unbearable when you make them work overtime. The idea is simple: an image can hold a charge. It doesn't hold the whole of life.
A photograph cannot return the person, the room, the voice or the moment. But it can change an entire afternoon when it turns up twenty years later. Something comes back.
And what comes back isn't always innocent.
An advertisement can store a promise inside a car or a watch. A flag can accumulate pride, grief and obedience over generations. A profile picture can preserve a version of someone until that version begins to weigh on the actual person.
The image waits. That is part of its power.
It can return a memory, but it can also keep a shame alive long after it should have passed. It can preserve a face and end up freezing it into a single version. It can show pain and, with enough circulation, turn it into content.
The things we keep can begin to keep us.
This happens all day. On the phone, in the mirror, in the family album, the passport, the missing-person poster, the campaign, the old photograph in a drawer.
We make images because things disappear. We want to say: this happened. This person was here. This mattered. There is something deeply human in that.
The problem begins afterwards, when an image separates from the life that produced it and starts circulating on its own. It can be cropped, sold, archived, turned into evidence, propaganda, desire or ridicule.
A face becomes a file. A worker becomes proof that a company is good. Grief becomes the hero shot. A protest becomes an aesthetic.
We all know that film. Some of us have even made it.
This doesn't make beauty suspicious. Beauty can protect dignity. It can make us look more carefully. It can give form to something that would otherwise be too difficult to hold. It can also arrange a crime scene very nicely.
So asking what an image shows is only the beginning. We need to look at what it does once it starts circulating. What it preserves. What it changes. What it simplifies. And what ends up taking the place of the thing it was only meant to represent.
An image can resist disappearance. It can return something we love. It can also leave us connected for too long to something that is no longer alive.
A battery doesn't preserve life. It preserves charge.
And not every charge takes us back to the same place.