Vladimir Nabokov
[Writer, b. 1899, St. Petersburg, Russia, d. 1977, Montreux, Switzerland.]

 All colors made me happy: even gray.
My eyes were such that literally they
Took photographs.  
 And by the striped man
directed at the sunny sand
blinked with a click of its black eyelid
the camera’s ocellus.

That bit of film imprinted
all it could catch,
the stirless child,
his radiant mother,

and a toy pail and two beach spades,
and some way off a bank of sand,
and I, the accidental spy,
I in the background have also been taken.

Next winter, in an unknown house,
grandmother will be shown an album,
and in that album there will be a snapshot,
and in that snapshot I shall be.

My likeness among strangers,
one of my August days,
my shade they never noticed,
my shade they stole in vain.
(1927) 
 ... today our unsophisticated cameras record in their own way our hastily assembled and painted world. 
 ...photographs of girl-children; some gaudy moth or butterfly, still alive, safely pinned to the wall.