At 11:30 in the morning on Tuesday, September 24, 1997, I stop and stand at the curb roughly halfway down Hygeia Place, a one-block back street in Stapleton, on the north shore of Staten Island, New York City's so-called "forgotten borough." In front of me is a most familiar space: a weed-filled lot bordered by Hygeia, Grove and Gordon Streets, in which the neighborhood kids play and the local dogs roam.

For twenty-eight years, I've lived in a house just up the hill to my right on Van Duzer Street, a minute's walk away. From my garden, my terrace, my kitchen, my dining room, my bathroom, at a different angle and from different heights, I see this same scene every day. Here's where I taught my son -- who's now grown and long gone from home -- to bat and catch, where he taught himself to "pop a wheelie" on his new bike, where we tried (unsuccessfully) to figure out how to throw the boomerang his grandmother brought back from her travels, where his junior high gang and I played frisbee till it got too dark to see in the long slow summer nights.

On November 26, 1943, less than a month before I was born, Max Ulrich, a New York City Parks Department photographer, stood in approximately the same place to make a picture. It was the Friday after Thanksgiving, and early in the day -- no later than ten a.m., to judge by the long shadows. Perched (I would guess, from the vantage point of the lens) on the roof of a Parks Department vehicle, Ulrich pointed his camera approximately west, set his aperture and shutter speed, and made his exposure.

At that point, the lot was an incipient, undeveloped playground. Levelled and asphalted over, it held only -- from the evidence of Ulrich's negative -- four sets of swings and two basketball hoops. The latter were not in use at that hour (or in that weather), but a number of the swings were occupied. Wheeling a pram, leading a toddler, a woman walked up Grove toward Court Street. Across the street from Ulrich and below his high perch, two boys of about ten years of age, warmly dressed like the others in the scene, were about to step from the brightness of the sun-drenched street into the shadow of a building to their left, on whose wall a graffito celebrating the movie Gunga Din had been scrawled.

That building is gone now, as are the swings, the basketball hoop, and the asphalt. If they are still alive, those children are middle-aged, the woman very old. The picket fence around the house at the corner of Grove and Gordon has been replaced with hurricane fencing. Houses have been variously re-painted and re-sided; No. 16 Gordon, partially destroyed in a fire a few years back (I photographed it burning; the whole neighborhood came out to watch), has been considerably remodelled.

And still . . . chop the weeds, repave the lot, stand where I've just come from standing and you'd hardly know that more than half a century has passed since this picture was made. Many of the structures remain unchanged, or only slightly altered, easily recognizable. The same manhole cover sits in the center of Hygeia Place, the same fireplug stands at the far curb of the lot on Gordon. Even the two tilted telephone poles at the center of the image -- one on Gordon, the other on Grove -- are still there, still leaning like the Tower of Pisa.

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We in the United States produce some ten billion photographs each year. The majority of these disappear over the years, of course, but a considerable percentage survive -- and, of those, a significant number end up in repositories scattered around the country, waiting for some fortuitous encounter to revivify them.

Any archive is only as good as its archivists and curators. Some of these gatekeepers believe it is their duty to protect the material under their supervision from the public; others are convinced that their job is to find ways of making these holdings available to the people, who financed their production in the first place. To its credit, and my consequent good fortune, the New York City Department of Parks for a time chose an archivist of the latter conviction.

Perhaps because he is himself a photographer (as well as a poet and film-maker), Gerard Malanga was eager to bring the riches of this unique collection of over 33,000 images to light, as well as to initiate research into its history and the lives of those who produced it. During his tenure (1985-88) this project became a model of the thoughtful, thematic exploration of a public photographic collection. Malanga's energy, and the support of the Department of Parks, resulted in an extensive series of exhibitions and publications, one of which brought Ulrich's photograph to my attention.

As a rule, little is known about people like Max Ulrich and the countless other photographers who have contributed for a century and a half to this extraordinary nation-wide visual data bank. If they're not literally anonymous, they're virtually so. Whatever their photographic skills and creative abilities, such photographers have been primarily committed to the recordative, informational function of their medium. Inevitably, self-expression has found its way into their images in many forms; but, appropriately, it has always been secondary if not incidental to their primary purpose -- the impartial encoding of data for current or future public use.

Thus it is with this photograph from the photographic archives of the Parks and Recreation Department of the City of New York -- and, by extrapolation, with the millions of photos in the thousands of archives around the country. They lurk mutely, waiting to be activated, so that they can offer us precious glimpses of our world as it was (and, in a few cases, still seems to be). In doing so, they give us the opportunity to compare our present with the past.

For, from the moment of its making, every photograph is engaged in a continuous dialogue with time. The tension of this dialogue -- its excitement, its drama -- comes from the opposition between the inexorable fluidity of the physical world and the comparative stasis of the frozen image.

Nowhere is this more true than with those photographs we make to serve as documents of people and places. Perhaps this is because people and places also maintain their own dialogues with time, changing with a rapidity so terrifying that we choose not to see it day by day, instead adapting to the incremental transitions. Only when something unusual -- a prolonged absence from a place, an extended separation from a person, or the discovery of an old photograph of either -- forces us to are we shocked into acknowledging the passage of time, the changes wrought thereby, and the burden of memory we bear.

It is that burden -- in which what we loosely call "nostalgia" is interwoven with the awareness of mortality -- that prompted Susan Sontag to write, in her book On Photography, "Time eventually positions all photographs at the level of art." No matter how prosaic the image or mundane its original purpose, every photograph has a unique, privileged relation to temporality. One of the things we, as viewers, bring to any encounter with any photograph is our sense of when it was made -- and the always-vast distance between that instant and our own present moment. Every photograph announces "This was . . . " And if we believe, along with the philosopher Heraclitus, that nothing is permanent except change, each photograph laments ". . . and never will be again."