Photography and Three Views of Time
If existence is limited to the present, if the present alone is actual — as Schopenhauer claims*, then a photograph is like a reincarnation. Photography is a godlike but non-divine activity according to which a human artist snaps the death of a present moment and later reembodies it as an image, a visible likeness of the now nonexistent original, which occupies a new present.
If existence is not limited to the present, but past moments also exist in a growing block, then a photograph is a current copy of an existing original which resides further back in the block along with the other non-extinct past items.
And if past, present, and future exist on an eternal timeline, then all photographs exist – those back then, now, and still to come – along with their originals, though each inhabits a different temporal address.
*See Counsels and Maxims, Our Relation to Ourselves, Section 5.