As a practising sociologist, I have many obsessions, concerns, and interests, some of which, I am told, border on the compulsive. For example, I have a longstanding interest in ephemera, documents of life, and everyday materials. For at least twenty years, I have continuously acquired items of sociological interest to me (even if no one else finds them interesting). I am particularly interested in discarded, lost, or unwanted materials—those items, objects, and the multitudes of ‘personal stuff’ that now seem readily available on online auction sites and marketplaces. Discarded diaries, long forgotten letters or pieces of correspondence, vintage cine films, photographs, family albums, photographic slides, and more visceral objects such as medals awarded or plaques bestowed following military conflicts. Documents of lives lived and of belonging, as well as bricolages of death and departure. As Belk (2024) suggests
Those of us who have lost parents and had to dispose of their estates know the pain of disposing of once-treasured possessions whose personal meanings to the deceased are abandoned as they are sold to new owners who will be oblivious to their stories. Or, more commonly, the objects may be unceremoniously junked like the scene at the end of Citizen Kane when his treasures…were tossed on the bonfire of the vanities.
However, it is not the ‘object’ of ephemera per se that interests me, but the analytical potential it represents. The value of the item lies in the long-term social processes, the relationships and continuities, and the changes in behavioural standards that the item signifies. The items are not unique, self-contained, or isolated, but point us towards relationships
I have also found photographs discarded in the street, which speaks very much to the embodied chaotic, unfolding practices of everyday life to which authors such as 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 image had a lasting impact on me and my perspective on such photographs, perhaps because I caught a brief glimpse into its creation.
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 a few hours later, but now the face paint had run, smeared, and smudged by the tears streaming down his cheeks. His parents, seemingly frustrated with him, were 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?
(c) John Goodwin, 2026
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