This image haunts me...or rather it is a haunted image. The ghost of my grandfather resides here. If you look carefully you can see, in the lower right hand corner, a shadow cast in the shape of a man.

"..it is this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me. A Latin word exists to designate this wound, this prick, this mark made by a pointed instrument...A photograph's punctum is that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)." (Barthes,1980, pp.26-27)

The woman in the photograph is my grandmother, Lillian. Presumably, the shadow is cast by my grandfather. I don't know. There's no one left alive who can tell me.

I never knew my grandfather, Robert Gye. He died when my father was only eight or nine. He is a mystery to me. The only memories I have of him are other people's memories.

"The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think?"
(Brian Massumi, 1987, pp. ix-xv)