A mysterious woman, the attraction of a photo
Two weeks ago I was (photo)walking around Aoyama, Tokyo, when I encountered a strange pile of garbage on the sidewalk. It was probably a Mac Performa’s box that first called my attention (I later found that the box was not empty!) and as I rapidly glanced through the stuff I saw some odd things for a garbage mound. First of all, there was no “waste” but used things that someone had decided to dispose of. With my curiosity on alert, these were the first identified items: a motorbike helmet, a desktop fan, a workout machine, old coins, several music CD’s, a digicam’s manual, a vertical stapler… and a couple of photographs. Everything was very clean and had been ordered with caution, not just disposed of. This seemed a very Japanese attitude.
I’m a fan of everything photographic, so the pics automatically drew my attention. Amongst them, I decided to keep this one of a mysterious woman (to me) and started fantasizing about who she was, what happened to her, to the one that took the photo and why was this print thrown away. An old lover? The nostalgia barrier broken by the practical view that in the end one had to get rid off all the superfluous and become lighter? (a point of view I might know something about due to my nomadic present).
Here she is:
[...] abandoned passport-type photos in an automatic photo machine, I have found several photos in Tokyo (see my previous post). The last 3 ones were in a printing machine in Yodobashi Camera, in [...]