The old wedding album keeps guests in relationships they no longer occupy.

Photographs hold a configuration of people as it stood on one afternoon. Everyone in the picture is still paired as they were paired then, still on speaking terms, still alive, and the album has no way of knowing what happened afterwards. They preserve a truth that was true, which is not the same as a truth that lasted.

If you look through one, let yourself feel more than one thing at once. And where a picture raises a name that is now difficult, you can put it down; there is no obligation to sit with every page.