"Without events, there is no time"

"Without events, there is no time."
This quote is really expressive of how we measure our lives. Our concept of "time" becomes a very human experience because of how we measure it. Of course we have seconds, minutes, hours, days, but we often find ourselves thinking about it in terms other terms, such as distance from here to there and how long it will take us, number of classes until the end of the week, minutes til the end of show, pages to the end of a book. In this way we are constantly searching for finality, a sense of completion.
Photography gets pulled into this in a variety of ways. It offers documentation of these experiences, of our experiences with time. If we don't document it, did it happen? Well, yes, probably. But capturing it or recreating it allows to preserve this instance and maybe even experience it again later. Photography also has its own experience with time, like the length of time the shutter is left open and amount of light is let in. This capturing of light is a capture of time and some human experience or vision with it.
Over the summer I recorded in a notebook what I did virtually every day. When I re-read these pages I'm surprised by how much I forgot or wouldn't remember had I not recorded it. If I had forgotten the events of the entire summer, for me it would be as if it never happened, that the time period of "last summer" didn't exist. It's similar to the idea of blacking out from, say, binge drinking. When you wake up and have no recollection of events your friends say occurred, you're left to wonder, "Did that really happen?" It's as if that time did not exist because you have no events from it.
So did it happen? I think this is part of the reason photography and record keeping are so important in our society and culture, to remind us that yes, time exists. We know it because these events prove it.