Glass Album

What a delightful touch this café owner has made by placing these 3x4 or 6x4 ID photos edge to edge beneath the glass of this table. I don’t know if these men are friends or acquaintances of the café owner, or if over the years these pictures have fallen here and there and now found a home underneath. In any case, they are photos of lost souls that seem to have once fallen to the floor or slipped out of a wallet—and now they’ve been found and are staring back at us. It’s as if they have become part of this coffee vendor’s belongings, turning into the male family album of this café owner. And how cleverly the photographer has positioned themselves so that all these faces look right at us, flowing toward us to pull us into the image; the moment we raise our heads, we pause, locking eyes with these young men. How perceptively the photographer has removed the face of the seated man in the middle of the frame and the standing man at the far end; by omitting these two faces, it’s as if the fathers disappear so that the faces of these two young men grow larger. In this play of presence and absence, we too wander within these small dimensions of the photos, searching for the fathers of these boys or the sons of these fathers.