But the peculiar magic of the Love Song, if it has the heart to do it, is that it endures where the object of the song does not. It attaches itself to you and together you move through time. But it does more than that, for just as it is our task to move forward, to cast off our past, to change and to grow, in short, to forgive ourselves and each other, the Love Song holds within it an eerie intelligence all of its own—to reinvent the past and to lay it at the feet of the present.-- Nick Cave The Secret Life of the Love Song
This, to me, is also the peculiar magic and the secret life of the photograph (if it has the heart for it) as a work of poetic art. There's not only the intimate one-on-one duality between the photographer's psyche and the individual viewer's, a duality that's always a personal landscape filled with hidden elements; but also that duality between the present moment in time and of a precise unrepeatable one in the past. It has nothing to do with medium or analysis or effort, and everything to do with relationship, with connection, with internal fit and corresponding rhythm.
