Annotated detail from my snapshot of a quote on the wall of the Niko Krivanek: dear sally, love mom photography exhibit in the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Saturday, October 23, 2021.

Text in image:

As that claustrophobic unit, the nuclear family, was being carved out of a much larger family aggregate, photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life. Those ghostly traces, photographs, supply the token presence of the dispersed relatives. A family’s photograph album is generally about the extended family-and, often, is all that remains of it. As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

-Susan Sontag, On Photography

Replace “photography” with “Facebook