Visual work allows us to see the ongoing and embodied practice everyday life, productions that are multidimensional and chaotic: skills and performances that cannot be reduced to words and which words alone cannot represent. Visual work embeds its’ sociological subjects in context. It places the unfolding of action in space and time, in particular material and symbolic circumstances and emphasises action as the performative arrangement and re-arrangement of these resources. (Halford and Knowles 2005: 1)
I have found photographs discarded in the street, which speak very much to the embodied, chaotic, unfolding practices of everyday life to which Halford and Knowles (2005) refer. Such discoveries can be both depressing and intriguing. They evoke sadness because they remind me that an instant in time has been lost, serving as a haunting reminder of what was and what could have been. One such discovered image had a lasting impact on me and my perspective towards such photographs, perhaps because I caught a brief glimpse into the creation of the image. In the mid-2000s, I found a photo of a ‘face-painted boy’ near the beach in an English seaside town. There was a carnival that day, and I had noticed this boy earlier as he begged his mum to have his face painted. He got his wish and, with his painted face, had his photo taken at a local photo booth. I saw the same boy again some hours later, but now the face paint had run, smeared and smudged by tears streaming down his cheeks. His parents, seemingly frustrated with him, had started shouting at him constantly. By early evening, the beach had emptied, and the families had disappeared, but the photo booth photograph of the ‘face-painted boy’ remained discarded near the beach. I picked up the photograph and wondered what his life was like. The boy was present but merely a disruptive distraction, barely noticed by his family— anonymous, even forgettable, except for the face paint.
This short account, reflective of the image, contains sadness and intrigue for any observer or recorder of social and cultural life. Even without knowing something of the backstory, the sadness is apparent in the snapshotted joyful moment captured on film, then lost during a fraught day trip to the seaside. It is intriguing because finding a lost photograph is difficult to comprehend in many ways, raising multiple questions. How did the image become lost? What are the circumstances surrounding its presence at that place and time? Was the photograph deliberately discarded, or was it accidentally misplaced?
Intyerested on more like this:
Goodwin, J. (2025). Encounters with ‘Found’ Photographs: Analytical Potentials for Sociology, Visual Anthropology and Ethnography, Journal of Anthropological and Archaeological Sciences (JAAS), DOI: 10.32474/JAAS.2025.11.000369
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