It's a little more than that, I think.
Those images haunt the present as spectres of an age (almost) past and hence do not properly belong to the present. The difficulty, however, is that they do not properly belong to the past either, as the world they depict was not ghostly and nostalgic (at least not about itself) in the same way we now feel when experiencing the images; it was literal and concrete and haunted by still older ghosts of its own past: ghosts that played into and helped create the ones we are experiencing now.
Hence, with history, as with language, meaning is endlessly deferred: ask what a word means and you are presented with a series of other words, each requiring its own linguistic definition, until, at last, you have little more than a grunt and a gesture towards some object or event in the physical world: the signifiers repeatedly fall short of the signified as the photo fails to depict the nature of its subject in anything but brute physical terms.
And yet they haunt us still.