The Image That Isn’t

 Not every photograph is taken.
Not every moment allows itself to be caught.
Some scenes instinctively shy away when they sense the camera’s intent – as if reality itself knows our human greed and occasionally says no to being archived.
Sometimes, I simply watch. Quietly, from the outside.
The light shifting across a wall.
An old woman’s gentle bun.
A man who doesn’t hurry, because there’s nowhere he needs to be.
A girl who forgets, just for a second, that someone might be watching.
The silence – not just an absence of sound, but a space filled with presence.
The camera rests on my shoulder, unmoved.
I don’t know if it’s laziness, reverence, or just a kind of wisdom – a knowing that some things are better kept exactly as they are: unfiltered, unframed, unclaimed.
These pictures never get posted.
They cannot be liked, commented on, or digitally stored.
They live elsewhere.
They are inner images, developed not with chemicals, but with time.
They come back to me during quiet evenings – a gesture, a luminous glance, a mood I once stood inside of.
I have a private archive for them.
Invisible, but precise.
The photo I never took in the café, when a man’s hand lingered just a second longer on the table.
The tram ride – an elderly woman caressing her coat sleeve, as if someone’s hand still rested there.
A doorway we never entered, but I always imagined how it might feel.
Imagined photographs are often the most precious because they cannot be re-seen.
Only remembered.
And remembering – when it’s honest – is closer to art than most sharp images will ever be.
Sometimes the eye photographs.
Sometimes the heart.
And sometimes, silence becomes the most accurate exposure. ~ Szingy photographer pharmacist