The Hard Problem of Consciousness

“It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, 

but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. 

Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? 

It seems objectively unreasonable that it should, and yet it does.” 
— Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness, David Chalmers

To be alive is to be conscious. While this statement seems an obvious fact, the dailyness of existence lulls us into living our lives rather than experiencing them. 

These photographs are testaments to the fictions - as well as facts - of our experience, and in the greatest of them, that awareness is what is perhaps the most ‘palpable’: That someone, at some point in time, stood in *that* spot, and shot that photo: and that “I”, at this moment in time, am beholding the very fact of this photo, is the invisible bond between the anonymous snapshot and the viewer.

This is a connection that I don’t find or feel in photographs which make any claims to being "Art". And it is this aspect that all found snapshots have in common. They are all linked in this dual necessity: the necessity of their having ‘had’ to be taken, and the necessity of their having ‘had’ to be saved. This is a powerful attachment, and one that is unique to found photography. Its *necessity* is embedded in its being.