There must be some secret of time held in these images. “I look at a photo and I know someone is probably dead and that one day I'll be dead too. “Every person in a photo is older than when that photo was taken,” she elaborated. Walker describes it as a shared relationship to time. The 70-year-old has published several books of found photographs, displaying them in pairs intended to evoke specific connections between disparate subjects: a prisoner and a baby, kids with toy guns and a wounded soldier, a woman in a hijab, and a woman in a catcher’s mask.Īmong these, as among all snapshots, there is a broader connection too. The ancestral portrait was passed down as an heirloom, but to Lenchner, it is also a collectable-one of 15,000 other images that he has bought over the years. Even before the war, he was not a happy man.

“One of the ironies,” the son noted, “is that my father didn’t get along with his family. The man in the back row is Dan Lenchner’s father. It is also, inversely, a portrait of the Holocaust-a documentation of what was lost.

In the picture, he already seems separate from them-he is the only one not looking into the lens. Everyone except the man in the back row, second from the right. Only, we knew-as the sitters never could have-that in 10 years, everyone in the photo would be dead. We sat at his dining room table studying a standard studio portrait-a group of 12 taken in Łódź, Poland circa 1935. I met the collector and catering-company owner sometime later in his sprawling Manhattan apartment. One of the attendees of that auction was Dan Lenchner. Sometimes, it almost feels like I can whisper back.”Ī photograph from the author’s collection (Courtesy of Roc Morin) It feels like someone is whispering to me across the decades. “It seems so incredible to me that a moment can be captured-that I can show up 50 years later and pick up an image and have this emotional response. “I can't believe photography exists,” she exclaimed. “The photographs gave me that same feeling–a certain kind of loneliness, but also connection to a force greater than myself, to the kind of chaos that ultimately creates exquisite patterns.” She remembered standing in the ocean herself back then, experiencing the sensation of the waves, created by the gravitational pull of a distant moon. After the volcanoes, it was people in water. It was like a dream I was seeking out an image to reflect back a feeling I could not articulate.”īefore the volcano period, she had collected images of people with their faces turned away. I started collecting volcanoes just before the first signs of it appeared. “It was just recently that I realized how precisely that theme corresponded to a major crisis in my life: destruction, danger, inevitability, tension built up over many years. “At the time, I thought it was purely aesthetic.

She sifts through the discarded memories of other people’s lives in order to find images that are personally significant. Like other snapshot collectors, the psychology student devotedly scours flea markets, estate sales, and the internet in search of her quarry. The true meaning of her fixation would only emerge years later. “I didn't know why I was collecting pictures of volcanoes,” Amelia Walker confided.

Random pictures of people