a picture is worth a thousand words...

I have never understood the essential meaning to this repeated quote until today. I was in my history of photography class, which I am currently obsessed with, when my teacher repeated this phrase to me.
When you take a photograph (more so a candid shot), you are able to capture this particular person place or event in time and refer to it whenever you wish. If you fail to capture the shot, you loose the image and it is lost forever in history. How incredible is this idea? To re-live a sacred memory? Your memory's photographic counterpart is able to take you back to that time which you held so close to your heart. An image is so powerful becuase it allows us to see into our past, to a point where things have the capability to become to vivid. We literally re-live the memory in our heads while we gaze at the photo.
I raised my hand mid-way through my teacher's explanation and asked him a simple question. What if this photograph does not belong to our memory, rather someone else's? I paused and then resumed my thought process. How incredible is it that I can look at a photo taken by someone else at another time when I was not present and formulate my own memory that the photo belongs to? Now imagine 10 people or 20 people or 100 people looking at the photograph? Imagine how many memories can formulate from one photograph? This is the power of a photograph. It is a single image in time that provides its own narrative through the imagination of many different people.

Everyone views a photograph differently. A picture is worth a thousand words, or a thousand memories, depending on how many people are looking at the picture.