A blank day beside the ocean in Dumaguete, overcast sky, empty street. This woman is walking somewhere with this little girl, who might be her daughter, or might not. She holds her arm up against the wind.
It seems be just an ordinary scene, except that the woman has a blank look on her face, as though she’s facing an empty future. But that’s just a guess. You can’t really say what she feels. Or if she feels anything.
You can’t tell much about individual people here from pictures, except in extreme moments like death and disaster, and then what is revealed is usually only the horror or pain anyone would feel in that situation.
But in this particular picture nothing violent was going on, and the people pictured had no reason to reveal themselves- people here will smile and wave when they see a camera, but are as expressionless as bread when caught off guard. Nothing personal or individual come across.
Other places are very different. In New York, for example, you can almost read total strangers sitting across from you in the subway, just by looking at them. Their personal dramas, thoughts and feelings ripple across their faces like wind over water. But not here.
A picture like this one can’t tell you much about the people in it.
What’s around them isn’t very revealing either. Sea water and cement, that’s about it. Only the abandoned kiosk in the center has anything to say, and what is says is “nothing here anymore”.
There’s certainly nothing dramatic here, no story, no suspense. The people you see are neither dangerous nor sexy. They will walk out of the frame and leave nothing behind them to remember.
But even so, this picture, seemingly about nothing, still has something forceful to say about the world that it comes from. That very blankness, lack of drama, absence of happiness or sadness- is what it has to say.
It’s a picture of that which is always there, and usually unseen. Here, stripped for the moment of drama or purpose, the world just is, although we can’t imagine why we, or anything, should exist at all. It’s a picture to remind us of pure existence – past feeling, past reason, past thought.
The woman walks down the empty street with a little girl. Their clothes ripple in the wind. The waves break on the shore.
