Ignorant Armies

“As it happens, there are snapshots, taken with a cheap camera by strangers randomly conscripted for the job. In each of these, the background is different, but more or less what you would predict; the second requirement of scenery, directly consequential to the first, is that within a small range of variables it be predictable. (This condition, however, may not consistently be met.) But the backgrounds, though useful as evidence of certain things, are not of primary interest to us at this point. We should look rather to the foreground, which varies hardly at all from picture to picture.

…The snapshots, then, both ilumine and obscure the man: we cannot know from them whether this is Asher as his accustomed world knew him, or another, ersatz Asher who existed only, and briefly in a California which itself only existed while he lived in it.”

D.M. Fraser: Ignorant Armies (Pulp Press 1990)