Years ago an editor friend and I thought up a feature called “It’s my bag,” in which we stopped people at Copley Square and asked them to share what was in their bag, knapsack, purse, you name it. It would run with a photo and a first-person description.
Like all good ideas, it’s already been done. Photographer Moyra Peralta asked people who lived on the street in London to share their possessions and tell her about them. The resulting photographs, which I found on Spitalfields Life, are poignant and telling.
She’s documented street life more fully in a book, Nearly Invisible, text by John Berger (he of the modestly titled Ways of Seeing.)
A Few Reasonable Words 