A Still Life of Yesterday

 

Description:

A poignant photograph of a back-lane table and its remnants becomes a meditation on memory, labour, and loss. Through still objects—cigarette boxes, a mop, and a solitary chair—life speaks.

 A Table for Two, and the Morning After

The morning light reveals more than form—it reveals aftermath. Slanted shadows cut across the wall, partitioning silence from memory. It's just after 9 a.m. on a Saturday. The sun has begun its vertical climb, but here, at the rear of a forgotten shophouse, time holds back, heavy and lingering. Nothing is urgent here.

A table stands against the wall—worn, but not collapsed. On it lie remnants: a brown beer bottle, plastic trays, metal pots, a carton of oil, disposable cups, cigarette boxes crushed like unspoken regrets. Someone smoked here. Not one, but maybe two. The kind of late-night smoke you light when words fail and silence must be filled with breath and burn.

The mop leans askew, like an afterthought or a witness. Maybe someone vomited—too much to drink, or too much to bear. Maybe the mop cleaned something more mundane: spilt oil, yesterday’s fish, or the ghosts of another argument. Its handle cuts across the scene like a question mark—forever unanswered, perpetually posed.

The wooden chair, centered beneath the table, has the poise of habit. It belonged to someone. The kind of someone who always comes first, sits long, and never needs to ask. Its counterpart, the flimsy stool, is either for the guest, or the transient. Their asymmetry speaks louder than their presence. Perhaps the wooden chair belonged to a father figure, the stool to a son trying to rise. Or maybe, the two were lovers, sharing a cigarette and a dream that dried up with the morning dew.

Empty cigarette boxes lie discarded—Mild Seven, maybe, or a local brand. Their emptiness is a whisper. Jean Baudrillard once wrote, “We live in a world where there is more and more information, and less and less meaning.” And yet here—among these disposables—we feel the residue of meaning that cannot be erased. Each box, each bottle, each battered item left unguarded, stands as an index of lived life, of repetition, and of retreat.

Underneath the table, beside the plastic pail and cooking oil, lies a folded stack of newspapers or flattened cartons. They might have once carried fish. Or been read and reread by someone for whom the printed page still offers structure in a collapsing world. Roland Barthes would call this the punctum—the sting, the wound in the image that pricks us. Not because of what we see, but because of what we know must have happened.

The famous urban still life photographer William Eggleston once said, “You can take a good picture of anything. A bad one too.” But this—this is not a good picture because it is beautiful. It is good because it is honest. Because it dares to look at what is normally turned away from. Because in its stillness, it breathes.

Jacques Derrida, the father of deconstruction, reminds us that “there is nothing outside the text”. And here, the text is the city. The objects are the characters. The meaning is neither fixed nor absent—it hovers in the undecidable tension between presence and loss.

This is a photograph of a life without names. But it is not anonymous. It is inhabited. By stories we will never fully grasp. By gestures we intuit. By a night that ended too late—or perhaps not late enough.

These chairs are altars.

These objects, offerings.

The mop, the bottle, the boots, the chair—together they echo a silent liturgy of survival.

As I stood before this scene, camera in hand, I did not want to photograph it. I wanted to listen to it. To allow it to speak. To let it whisper its truths in the crack of shadow and angle of wood.

“We do not remember days, we remember moments.” — Cesare Pavese

And this was one such moment.