A Torn T-Shirt

I collect photographs of torn posters on walls. You’d be surprised how many there are these days. Some so very torn they are just a few scraps of paper still clinging to the wall with grim death. Equally, even a poster with a small nick in the corner could count as a torn poster. I never cheated by tearing a poster myself before photographing it and posting it as a torn poster. I also never tell lies, do rest assured. Belonging to an online group specialising in photographing torn posters, I thought I would start a group for torn T-shirts, but I hated taking photos of people so these T-shirts needed to be found in the wild without a wearer within them. You can imagine I rarely found such a thing and it would need to be found naturally, never planted, never staged, otherwise it didn’t count. I spent years finding a torn T-shirt without a wearer within it. And then, lo and behold, there was a poster with a T-shirt upon it! The wearer of it was not real of course being an image on a poster — so this would thus be valid. All I had to do was tear the poster where the T-shirt was situated and I could be the first member on my online group to post a photo. But I did not cheat as I have told you already so I depended on mind-over-matter, as I stared at the intact poster of an intact T-shirt. I remained there forever stuck in position like a photograph frozen in time not wearing a strait jacket, not a time shift as such but a time shirt for which the expression T-shirt was short for a poster of photographs frozen as a photograph thus posted online, the wear and tear making the image of the T-shirt valid without the need of cheating or clinging in grim death. Don’t go there.