Illustrative Circle example
Rosa and Femi, Trani 1987.
One Circle, followed the whole way through, so the shape of the thing is visible in one place rather than a feature at a time. This is the study that uses everything.
This is a fictional story
It started with the invitation.
A wedding in Trani in September 1987, with guests who travelled from Lagos, London and Milan. Rosa created the Circle nearly forty years later, and the first thing she put in it was the invitation she had kept in a drawer.
A Circle can begin with one person and one thing. This one grew when she invited the people who were there.
Six members, and not one of them can do everything.
What each person can do was set by Rosa, who owns the Circle. Grazia, who helped at the venue and was invited nearly forty years later, can look, listen and comment, and add nothing.
Rosa
The bride. Created the Circle, and is its owner.
Owner
Femi
The groom. Brought his family’s photos from Lagos.
Contributor
Elide
Rosa’s grandmother, 71. Names people nobody else can.
Viewer
Chiara
Rosa’s sister. Had a compact camera that night.
Contributor
Tunde
Femi’s brother, who flew from Lagos.
Contributor
Grazia
Helped at the venue. Invited years later.
Viewer
Nobody had the whole evening. Between them, they did.
The official album is square and tripod-steady. Everything else is a different camera, a different height and a different half of the night.
The official album
Square, even, everyone facing the camera. Paid for, and complete.
A guest from London
Available light, off-centre, blurred. The frame everyone asks for.
Chiara
Flash on a compact camera. Elide speaking, and nobody else has this.
Tunde
Too close, too much flash, the top of a head cut off. Kept anyway.
Grazia
The room before anyone arrived. The only photo of it empty.
Two people, four minutes, and they do not agree.
Elide recorded hers in her own voice. Chiara wrote hers down. Both are kept, each credited to the person who gave it, because the disagreement is the part worth having.
- Voice story2 min 14 s
“I had not planned to say anything. I got up because nobody else was going to, and then I could not stop. I said the thing about her grandfather and half the table went quiet.”
Elide, 71
- Written story
“Nonna spoke for about four minutes. Nobody recorded it, which is the single thing about that day I would change.”
Chiara, 61
One person, followed through her ages.
Reference views of Rosa at three points in her life, added by three different members. The same eyebrows, the same mole on the left cheek, forty years apart.
1987The wedding. Twenty-six. 
2004Added by her sister. 
NowAdded by her daughter.
A reviewed Likeness of Rosa at twenty-six is what keeps the restoration below from inventing somebody. It reduces guesswork; it does not promise accuracy, and it is only used where the Circle has consent to use it.
A damaged print, mended and prepared for a wall.
Drag the handle. The original is on one side and the restored version on the other, and both are in the Circle. The source is never replaced by what is made from it.
The courtyard, rebuilt from four views of it.
Two members took pictures of the same place from different corners on the same afternoon. Together they make a scene that can be looked around.
Built from these four
Grazia · From inside the entrance arch 
Grazia · Down the length of the tables 
Chiara · Along the shaded colonnade 
Chiara · Back towards the entrance
The scene is a created interpretation of the place. It is kept alongside the photos it was made from, labelled as created, and never presented as one of them.
Privacy and permission, in this Circle.
A wedding Circle holds pictures of a hundred and forty people, most of whom are not in it, and a Likeness of a woman who is still alive.
- Rosa is the only owner. Grazia was invited thirty-two years after the wedding as a viewer, and viewing is the whole of what she can do.
- Rosa’s Likeness exists because Rosa agreed to it, specifically, and the record of that agreement names her and the wording she agreed to. She can withdraw it, and withdrawing it does not withdraw anything else.
- Femi’s Likeness covers 1987 only. A photo of him at sixty would need its own, and his family decides whether that exists at all.
- Every created version on this page is kept identified as created and linked to the source it came from. The damaged print is still in the Circle, damaged.
Start the one you have been meaning to start.
Most people arrive here with one damaged photo and the feeling that somebody should write down what the people in it were called. That is the whole beginning of a Circle.
Start with a free trial. Invitees do not need a subscription of their own.