Barthes is often misquoted, erroneously, as having stated that from one to as much as four percent of the weight of the world’s material possessions are photographs. An absurd number, for what is a photograph — a slip of paper, an amalgram of pixels — when compared to a coat, a horse, a house, or a gun? Yet practically this calculation is far too modest a model, for what holds down our walls, stiffens our wallets, and fattens our resolve? Not to mention all those photographs we’ve born before, lost, and can conjure now, stark and embellished by our machinations. The staggering toil of augmentation is merciless. The persistent entitlement to abduct time and appropriate likeness serves best to condense our dreams, compound our memories, and sentimentalize our fears. Trapped in this way, portentous and latent, aleatoric and discriminate, mutinous and inimical, light lies, always in wait. It’s not the seeing that we care so very much about, but the beings seen and the gravity of being seen again.