When does a photograph exist?

We heard often people mentioning that they have tons of photographs but they never select their prefered ones. If they don't select the photographs, they never print these and never show these to someone else. Are these photographs really existing?

After the discovery, selection and publication of the Vivian Mayer's works. Her work started to exist on its own. You can say a photograph exists even without a camera as you can take mental pictures of moments. It's indeed true but souvenirs alone don't do a good photograph. In the process of choosing a good picture, you should be able to lost a part of the history behind like the difficulty perceived when taking the picture.

Sometime ago, I took some pictures in front of a graffiti from Mr. Chat in Paris:

One photograph emerges from the stack, a lady lost in her thoughts hug by Mr. Chat.

Mr. Chat liks to hug, ƒ/2.0, 135mm, mrchatflickr on flickr

The photograph was selected to be part of a series about "movement" in an exhibition in Virton.

The interesting part is that another artist (Jean-Luc Stiernon) got the print of the picture. He even draw a representation of the photograph in a drawing. A kind of meta-art.

If the initial selection was not made, such dynamic will never exist.