esse ist percepi

John saw a woman and fell completely in love.

I jokingly threw Sontag at him. Sontag called photography “a way of certifying experience.”

Photography has become one of the principle devices for experiencing something…Taking photographs has set a chronic voyeuristic relation to the world which levels the meaning of all events.

John responds that “The camera is not in the way, it is the way.”

I agree, but it forces a corollary: that moment only exists photographically. A photograph perceptually creates a new existence that is nothing otherwise. This idea has been most clearly expressed photographically (as if there were any other way to express it) in the work of Levitt. Yes, John, you are continuing the ongoing moment.