The Photograph No One Else Would Have Taken

Not the sunset, not the monument, not the moment everyone else in the crowd was also photographing from a nearly identical angle. The photograph I actually keep coming back to is smaller than that — a hand resting on a table between two cups, taken for no reason I could explain at the time, ordinary enough that I almost didn't bother.

I think this is the real value of keeping a personal record rather than a public one. Anyone can document the sunset; a hundred people did, that same evening, from roughly the same spot. Almost no one else on earth has a photograph of that particular hand, on that particular table, in that particular light. It isn't a better photograph. It's the only one. That's a different, quieter kind of importance.