Photographs halt everything in time.  The man in the mountain before it crumbled to dust, forests before they burned, icebergs before they melted, loved ones before they died.  Photographs keep the past around and memories alive. They present memories and events making us feel empathy in a more powerful way than reading words on a page.  The visuals bring us to the time and place it was taken, and absorb us into it's story.  They force us to remember exactly what an event was like through a visual history.  Photographs serve our pasts on a silver platter.  Showing us what we looked like when we were younger, activities we were a part of and the people we surround ourselves with. 
     I remember seeing a picture of my mother and her sister when they were 5 and 7.  My mom tore open the present only to laugh and cringe by what she saw.  My grandmother then proceeded to turn around and show me a photo the package contained.  It was old and yellowed like a glossy piece of parchment and showed one happy little girl in Princess Lea buns who looked very much like me at that time, sitting to the right of a slightly older girl with a resentful look on her face.  The girls sat on a wide, white chair.  When asked was in the picture my only thought was, “That’s me and Kiera”, my younger sister.  That answer was followed by lots of laughter and an explanation that no, that was not Kiera and I, but my Mom and aunt when they were 5 and 7.  I remember thinking, “that can’t be Mom, it looks identical to me, they must be joking!”.  Photographs are there to capture a moment in time.  They help us visually understand the past and be able to compare them to today. Without photographs it wouldn’t have been possible for me to fully understand how similar my mother and I looked when we were 5.  Most people would never have known what a WW1 looked like, what a Wooly Mammoth looked like before it was a statue of bones, and how green Earth was before deforestation if photography wasn’t invented.  Photographs preserve time in a way nothing else can.