If the man in the beard isn't really Santa, is anything else real? It is a photograph "of me," but how is this girl, or the image of this girl, "me"? Something about her seems to draw me in, but it may simply be that I believe that I was once her. There's not even a striking physical resemblance: if I showed this picture to a recent acquaintance, they wouldn't be able to put "me" into the image without prompting. My brother, who is now six-three and getting a degree in Physics, is trapped there with me. Perhaps this is then a photograph "of him," not "of me," in which my six-year-old image appears.

This picture is faded, has a line of ink curved like a hair across the face of "Santa." Like the time it documents, the picture is impermanent. My memory has already lost this moment, and I have grown taller and stopped smiling at the camera. This moment can be lost completely, with the loss or destruction of this piece of paper.*

Before photography, there were no "moments" in our memories. My recollection is fragmented, catalogued by image. Somewhere, in a yellow box in the drawer my parents have reserved as an archive, there may be a negative of this photograph. My mind, on the other hand, has no back-up. This photograph is more real than my memory.

I don't have pictures of myself between the ages of seven and seventeen. The gap begins with the onset of my "awkward stage" (which hasn't so much ended as been ignored). My teeth went funny, I wore my bangs very low. Pictures of this time exist but only in a dusty cabinet at my parent's house. Later, around the time I started growing breasts and hips and being looked at in a whole different way, I wouldn't allow photographs to be taken at all, except the obligatory school photos which I would later attempt to toss out when no one was home. Photographs of me during this time feature a common pose- my hands in front of my face, or my hands blocking the camera lens. (As it turns out, my hands are quite photogenic).

Page from New York Newsday, October 18, 1993: behind a set of turntables in a radio studio, a girl leans sideways into a desk chair. She has long hair, wears a dark dress and lipstick, looks to be about 20. The grainy newsprint black and white gives her perfect skin, high contrast. The caption below the photograph gives her my name. Can I look at this person, this image, and see what someone else saw, opening up the Business section over their bagel and coffee? Everyone brings their own history to everything they see. Maybe it looked like an old girlfriend, maybe someone thought, "I like that necklace."

I went to a show at CBGB's later that October, and as I walked through the smoky dark corridor next to the bar, I heard someone shout, as was necessary in the din, "Hey, it's Laure from WNYU!" I met a lot of people in my job, so the fact that I did not recognize my greeter was not really unusual, and I just smiled and kept walking. Then it happened again, and again, and I knew that I was either a very early victim of Alzheimer's or I was being "recognized." I knew then that there were people, people familiar with WNYU, who had now put my face to my voice, or to the music that I chose for the station, even if they had never seen me in person. I wasn't sure how to feel about my newfound prominence, all for four lines of copy in a three page article. The image eclipsed the thought.

The picture of my brother and I on Santa's knee, like so many of my childhood images, is fading. Yet there is a permanence to the image that makes us aware, each time we see a photograph, that the image surpasses death. I look at a photograph of a young tomboyish girl, perhaps eight years old, standing beside a yellow-haired woman in a wheelchair, with a white-haired man behind them. The man and woman are smoking; in the background sun glints on a motorboat moored at a worn pier. The girl, whose clothing I remember wearing, is stuck forever in a bowl-cut. The man and woman are forever alive, though it's been more than a decade since I saw them buried.

In his book Camera Lucida, the French semiotician Roland Barthes says, "ultimately, what I am seeking in the photograph taken of me... is Death." And later, "with the photograph, we enter into flat Death" (his emphasis).

It is spring, 1976. A woman with dark, glossy hair kneels next to a small blond girl in a red jumper. This is the child's first visit to the Butchart Gardens. The woman is pointing at a tulip, which is red and open, streaked with yellow. The girl peers into the flower, bending at the waist to get closer. Beside her, another tulip is as tall as she.

Again, a moment is gone for me, preserved only in this still-bright print. Yet there is something in this moment, in this image, that catches in my throat. The apparent curiosity and trust of the girl I once was fills me with something like love, like infatuation. I was she; I am she. In moments I am this child, open and inquisitive, and here is her image. Something about her little hand clutching her mother's wrist with two of her fingers, her blurry face. The image summons her into my consciousness, until I feel the girl under all the grown-up layers. I laugh after all; that is me.