About nine years ago, while visiting my parents in Muskogee, Oklahoma, I stopped off at a small used book store downtown. It was an old building--the stamped tin on the ceiling suggested a hardware store or pool hall from the 20s. There were books and magazines and mildewed wrinkled papers and all sorts of junk everywhere. Books stacked on tables and in battered cardboard boxes beneath tables and elsewhere tottering in tall stacks and still many more strewn about where they had fallen. Somewhere in this mess I came across a very old anthology of poems. In this book I found--tucked somewhere in Tennysson--three crumbling newspaper clippings from 1909 along with a small daguerrotype. One of the newspaper articles was about an automobile accident in Neosho, Missouri in which a man named C. M. Daniels, age 49, was injured. Another clipping was this man’s obituary. A third was a letter to the editor, a sweet, eloquent note from Mrs. Daniels thanking friends for their kindness during her time of loss. I could only assume the photograph was of Daniels himself, a young man stiffly posed with his shirt buttoned to his chin.

I read these clippings and cupped the weight of this small daguerrotype in my palm, and there in the far corner of the store, the air rich with musty smells, something interesting happened. C.M. Daniels, dead for nearly a hundred years, bloomed back to life for a moment, having fallen from the pages of an old book.

A year or so later I found a family photo album at a flea market in Monroe, Louisiana. The album was full of color Polaroids taken sometime in the 1960s, judging by the clothes worn by the photos’ subjects, a group of 8 men and women on vacation in Acapulco. At the time, I didn’t know how rare it was to find a complete album of found photographs. But I felt a small tickle of voyeurism just holding it. And I was struck by the color and composition of the photos. Polaroids age well; like the sepia tint of daguerreotypes, their flat, muted colors have come to signify their own chunk of the past. In fact, I bought the album thinking the pictures might make good subjects for my wife, who paints from photographs.

All the photos were from a group vacation, beginning with a going-away party--with dancing and cocktails--and ending with shots of the plane ride home, wispy clouds outside the window. Flipping through the album I started to piece together strands of a story about these people. I noticed in many of the pictures one older woman seemed to be tired or perhaps angry. A younger man was always smiling, clearly drunk. I started playing detective, matching couples, theorizing who was in charge and who were the subordinates, who paid for the drinks. The Polaroids gave me the same feeling I got from reading a thick novel, a sense of having opened up the musty closets of other people’s lives.

I have collected a couple hundred photographs since then, all from flea markets and estate sales, most found in large unsorted piles or in shoeboxes, and sold for a quarter or so. In larger cities there are conventions of photo collectors, places where people can pay up to hundreds of dollars for something special, but I hunt for mine at yard sales and thrift stores: I’m there to save the subjects of my photos, to rescue them from oblivion. They’ve fallen down a well and I’m pulling them back to the surface.

Most of my collection is from the 1900s to 1950s, though I also have a few 19th-century tintypes and daguerreotypes I treasure. Their density and weight make them seem so substantial; they are artifacts in their own right. When I hold one I like to imagine it carried in some long-dead soldier’s breast pocket or resting at the bottom of a trunk for decades. Every scratch and blemish has its own resonance--the scratches themselves are much older than I am and so seem less like flaws than a kind of erosion, evidence of the photo’s own history as an object formed and handled by human hands.

When hunting for photos, I flip through stacks of them very quickly. I have to force myself to slow down, in fact, because I can get over-excited and tense, like a greedy prospector panning for gold flakes, sure I’m on the verge of making a great find and missing the minor beauties.

If I’m lucky, certain images stop me. Any photo I pause over gets put in a separate stack for second consideration. What makes some photos stand out, I can’t say. Composition and aesthetic concerns come into play but for me composition must be entwined with content. I’m looking for images that make my heart ache a little bit. For reminders of wonderful strangeness, for images that hint at love or sorrow, and for a kind of art, an aesthetic stumbled upon at the intersection of photographic technique and luck.

When I tell people I collect photographs I assume up front they are going to think it’s a weird thing to do. I wonder if it seems morbid or voyeuristic. But the fact of the matter is my photos--because they always keep me distant, longing to know--are just one manifestation of a general feeling of love for the human race. Sometimes for a moment I’ll almost fall in love with a woman in my photographs. Mostly, however, I get a feeling of brotherhood and sisterhood with all people, and when it happens the men and the children and old ladies fill me with an expansive feeling of generosity and real affection for all humanity, which is a nice feeling to have now and then.

Of course, despite my detective games the subjects in found photographs remain strangers, long dead and distant. But handling them sometimes late at night, when everything is quiet, I awaken to the unknowable richness of all time. I do not believe in ghosts or anything permanent as a soul, but in these moments I sense the continuity of human presence. And in the presence of this phenomenon I give a kind of quiet thanks to those who came before--the people in my photographs and all others living or dead, all a part of me, part of the same experience of having found ourselves here on this planet, in this brief and colorful life.