I think a lot of us are with Garry Winogrand, Lou: "I photograph to see what the world looks like in photographs."
I frame and hang what I think are my best and I put a lot of stuff in comb-bound books, but that doesn't mean that stuff never will be seen again. I frequently look back. I enjoy looking back at Korea during that war, at Vietnam during that war, and at Thailand from the year-and-a-half I was there. But I also enjoy seeing what places like Cripple Creek and Victor looked like back in the sixties. In a sense, the sequence of the images is a continuum. The whole thing fits together, though there are changes -- eddies in the flow. Then there's the sequence from the prairies around Colorado Springs I shot in the sixties. Those things are gone now, and the images hold what's left of the transition from the homesteaders and subsistence farmers to today's efficient corporate farming.
The world is an interesting and beautiful place. Photographs capture some of that interest and beauty. I couldn't stop shooting if I tried.