And still, photography holds the power to clarify… It’s a cliché to remark, at the end of the year, that the time has moved quickly and slowly all at once. But one of the dark powers of our devices is to bend time, to suck us into the screen and spit us out seemingly months later. It can sometimes feel as if the only thing that exists is the one that’s being talked about online right now. To study these photographs is to be perpetually surprised at what has just happened: The last mass shooting before the last mass shooting before the last mass shooting; the hurricane before the flood before the fires. It seems impossible, looking back at a photograph from President Trump’s inauguration, that Barack Obama was actually president of the United States earlier this year.
