are you sitting down?

Close your eyes, Stretch your arms out as far as they go. Raise them up a few centimeters and lower them, slowly. Splay your fingers out, and if you're not too cool, wiggle them. Do you make contact?

Whatever you touch, (you can open your eyes now), grab it and rip off a piece. It could be a silver of a newsprint or the edge of a record sleeve or the hem of your curtains. Put it in your pocket.

That's a photograph. The next time you wear that jacket, you'll be fumbling around for some change or a lighter or whatever the hell you keep in there, and you'll pull this thing out. You'll hold it between your thumb and your forefinger and stare at it, cocking you head like Lassie straining to pick up the scent.

And then, bam. This room, just as it is now, will come rushing back. Where the light came from to fall across the page, the thickness of the dry paper on your fingertips, the angle of your back against th chair and your feet where they touch the floor. You'll remember the warmth of the day and whether there was music or scents in the air; you'll remember if you were hungry, shitty, in love. The bits and peices around it will dribble back; you'll remember where you woke up this morning (and who with) and how the rest of today unfolded, even as it stretches out ahead of you right now unformed and full of possibilites.

This little piece of nothing will connect you with everything, real and imagined, about this time and place. Like a photograph you've taken yourself, its more than once slice of time, it's the suggection of everything you've forgotten you remembered about getting to where you are right now.

Other people's photographs are like that too, but because you usually don;t know what's around the edges, and what came before and after, there's more blank space for you to project into. You could hink about the composition and the lighting, or you could use it as one of those pocketed memories and image a narrative or relationships or the journey that got the subjects and the photographer to that point. You can think about what they had for breakfast or what they're doing right now. A photograph is a tool of suggestion and a spark for questions you don't normally get to ask yourself, and about your life and the world that falls outside the frame.

By Jess Scully: Hijacked Volume One, Australia and America