There are 30,000 photographs lurking on my computer, all of them from the last few years. If you know me, you are not surprised by that number. If you are like me, you might have even more on your computer. But this throng of images makes me wonder what drives my greedy stockpiling of fleeting moments, most of them not particularly momentous.

It started early. One of my stand-out childhood memories of Christmas is of unwrapping a boxy Polaroid Land camera, my “big gift” one year in the late 1960s. In that moment, I felt as if my parents really did know who I was and who I hoped to become. No number of pixels in my phone will ever compare to the eerie magic of watching my first Polaroid image slowly come into being — a blurry close-up of our dog Chrissie, if I remember right.

I’ve been taking photographs ever since. It has, at times, been part of my job. But mostly it’s been a reflexive way to mark time and change. Sometimes it’s a mediation, and sometimes it’s a way to transform a dull moment into a fun game.

Since moving back to this area, the bleak expanse of January and February has become my favorite time for taking pictures. It’s easier to stay close to home and look more intently at a familiar world transformed. Snow turns the landscape into an etching. The play of ice and water in the creek is infinitely varied. Winter sunlight is so pure, and the shadows so sharp.

A couple of weeks ago, my friend Abby and I spent a day wandering around Holyoke in that crispy winter sunshine taking photographs of empty paper mills stretched out along the canals, their brick walls turned into canvases for graffiti art, barely another pedestrian to be seen but still the occasional hopeful art gallery or coffee shop or row of curtained windows hinting at lives inside.

My favorite images from that day are of the windows in an empty old brick building. They’d been covered with warped plexiglass, and in the sharp winter sunshine reflected a wildly distorted image of the boxy modern gray-and-white building across the street.

Why are so many of us devoted to this particular form of memorializing daily experience? Photographic images have become so ubiquitous that one might assume they have lost their power to surprise us or shift our perceptions. (According to researchers, we humans are taking an estimated 5 billion photos every day, and about 93 million of them are selfies.)

While never particularly trustworthy — the camera has always been an accomplished liar — photographs in the age of artificial intelligence seem to be rapidly becoming both more “realistic” and less “true.”

There’s a phrase that pops up over and over again in serious-minded conversations about the “why” of making photographs: “Every photograph is a self-portrait.” The first time I encountered it, I didn’t think much of it. But then I heard it in a photography class, read it in a book and then in another book. Then I saw it in a photo blog.

Oddly, almost every time I come across this quote it is attributed to a different well-known photographer. Some attribute it to Minor White, a master of the black-and-white print with an interest in Zen philosophy; others cite Sally Mann, known for large-format photographs of her family and domestic surroundings; and still others reference the great Depression-era photographer Dorothea Lange.

I can’t argue with that bunch, so there must be something to it. Perhaps it is the intensity with which a photographer sees and in that moment responds to what she or he sees. It can certainly be a way of projecting yourself onto the world while also standing back, and of capturing not just what you see but how you see it.

On the other hand, sometimes we push the shutter for the sheer fun of it — to catch the way a rising winter sun can turn my mare Maizie into a balloon animal, and turn me into Gumby’s giant stretchy sister. Yes, this photo is a self-portrait. But that is certainly not the point.