[Photos are] our memory-keepers and our histories, the last thing we would grab [in a crisis], and the first thing you'd go back to look for.

Manson frames photographs as a form of portable, externalized memory: they preserve personal and collective history in a way that feels both intimate and irreplaceable. The contrast—“the last thing we would grab” during an emergency, yet “the first thing you’d go back to look for”—captures how crises reorder priorities toward immediate survival, while loss later reveals what truly anchors identity and belonging. The quote also implies that photos function as proof: evidence that people, places, and relationships existed as remembered. In that sense, photography becomes not merely decorative or nostalgic, but a safeguard against forgetting and a tool for rebuilding a narrative after disruption.