Social Documents

I was just watching a YouTube video by Stephen Leslie in which he says that fateful sentence that all photographs become social documents in time. I guess it is true, and even a vase of flowers or a bowl of fruit can be forensically examined for life in former times.

So then I was looking at some of my own photos, and came across this that I took on the 27th January this year (with an X-E3 with 27mm f2.8 lens). I was sitting at a table just across the way and I took the photo because of some consonance between the colours of the clothing of the man and the woman. And also simply because it was colourful. And also because of the way the two of them are standing.

And who knew that just this eleven months later that masks would be gone for the most part, and that the masks here would become a social document.

Here is the first in the short series of videos by Stephen Leslie. He’s got a lovely delivery – tongue in cheek but serious too. He wavers a bit and that adds to the charm of the man.