A plate and a spoon

Photographers love to tell stories by means of their photos. These can be simple holiday pictures that tell where you have been, or family photos that say something about your family life, or the photos of a party that show with which friends you were there. Photos can tell also complicated stories, like the life of the Native Americans at the beginning of the 20th century, as Edward S. Curtis did; or the life in a refugee centre; or how the royals live, to mention a few arbitrary examples. One of my favourite photographers who tells stories is Walker Evans, who documented the effects of the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Photographers see stories everywhere. That’s why they always take a camera with them. Nowadays that’s easy for everybody has a smartphone with a camera, anyway (and with a smartphone camera you can take excellent photos), but in the past you had to take a “real” camera with you. Photographers always see photographic themes, wherever they go. They see the world with a photographic eye. It is the same for me, being a photographer as well. My photographic eye is particularly specialized in seeing objects on the ground that people have lost or left behind (see here and here). So, lately I went to Utrecht, and when I left the central railway station via the passage under the station, my eye was caught by the food plate and the spoon of the picture at the top of this blog. Of course, I had a camera with me and I took the photo. Why was that plate with a spoon there on the ground? It is not obvious to find a plate with a spoon on the ground in a city. You could expect there wads of paper, packages, cigarettes, food waste, or maybe objects lost such as you can see in the links just given. But a food plate with a spoon? It was as if someone had been sitting there eating a meal. Maybe this was what had happened there, for covered passages, like the one under the Utrecht central railway station, often attract homeless people who sometimes even live permanently in such places. Although the latter doesn’t happen in this passage, it may have been a homeless person who went to this sheltered place for eating a meal. Or was it a traveller who had left the plate and the spoon there? Someone who had bought a meal in the railway station upstairs and had eaten it there? And had the background, the photo on the wall of the underpass, something to do with the scene? Had the person who ate the meal there chosen that place on purpose or had he or she ignored or not even noticed the photo? (By the way, once, some 50 years ago, the passage under the railway station was also used as a possible bomb shelter in case of war; to remember this photos on the wall show the technical room of the bomb shelter) So my thoughts went on about what might have happened there in this underpass; and about who this person who had eaten a meal there might have been and what this person might have eaten.

The railway station itself is very clean as it is permanently cleaned, but this pedestrian tunnel can be quite dirty because it doesn’t belong to the railway station. So when I passed it one day later again, the plate and the spoon were still there. However, there was a difference. Now the spoon was on the ground about one to two meters to the right of the plate, while the plate had been moved a little bit to the left (see the second photo). What had happened in the meantime? Had someone given a kick against the plate? But then the plate would have been moved much farther from its original place. More likely is that someone had accidentally kicked on the plate, so that the spoon was levered up and fell down a little bit to the right.
The story doesn’t end here, as the third photo shows. A few days later I walked again through the underpass: They still hadn’t cleaned it and plate and spoon

were still there! Again their position had changed, or rather the position of the spoon was still the same as in the second picture but the plate had been moved a few metres to the left. Now the most likely explanation is that someone had kicked the plate, as if it were a ball, but had ignored the spoon (or even hadn’t seen it).
Photographers love to tell stories. In this way they try to capture life. However, the story behind a scene is not always immediately clear, and maybe it will never become clear what happened. Just this can make a photo of a scene of life so intriguing! Or rather, not the photo as such is intriguing, but what we see in the photo, for a photo is a representation of what it depicts, and certainly a street photo as the one I analysed here is. At first, the subject of the photo discussed seems boring, but is it? As we have just seen, the plate and the spoon in the photos are not “just” a plate and a spoon, but there is a real person behind it. Like a homeless person who may have a tragic life story. Or maybe it was a traveller who had just left the railway station and was in a hurry to an appointment and had no time to take a meal in a restaurant. Seen this way the photos in this blog and the scenes they depict are not banal stories. They give a glimpse of life as it happens; life as it is lived by everybody. For doesn’t life exist most of the time of such banal scenes tied together? But are they really banal? I think they aren’t, for life couldn’t happen without a stream of such “banal” and daily events. They are the background of what people often see as the “real” life but this real life is not possible without such a background. That’s also the value of such simple, “banal” photos: They show the building blocks of life, the foundation of what makes life valuable. But alas, as in the photo discussed, often a photo that depicts such a building block can be no more than that, for often we don’t know and cannot find out to which and whose foundation the building block belongs.