Words by Jonah Buchanan
June 1, 2025
Several years ago, on a rainy morning at the Chelsea Flea Market in Lower Manhattan on W 25th St., I leafed through a folder full of miscellaneous international photos. As the rain pattered the tarp above me, protecting the seller, their goods and myself, I picked up three photos depicting the 1994 World Cup. I paid $5 and just like that, they were mine to take.
There was no information about the photographer, the match depicted, or how they had ended up before me. The photos were amateur in origin, most likely taken by a ticket holder who — at least three times — turned a handheld camera away from the pitch and released the shutter.
One shows a performance: a group of Brazilians fans with a drum and tambourine pack behind a TV news anchor. Another shows a reconciliation in the stands: a smiling young man holds a Brazil shirt towards the camera while another proudly flies the flag of Argentina. The last is a moment of desolation: a fan sporting the Netherlands National Team’s orange kit sits on the ground, staring beyond the limits of the photo.
These photos, though never intended to be seen by my eyes, found their way to me. They are three documents that immediately, meticulously and completely preserve moments in time. First witnessed by our photographer, which were passed onto me, and now you.
Ephemera — coined as, “throwaways not thrown away,” by Mary Desjardins in “Everyday Ebay” — offers a unique access point to shared experiences. In a world of reported actualities, firm facts and official records, these throwaways invite us to follow the visual traces of a story inside of which a single moment can become something more substantive than the whole.
For years, these three photos have lived sat within a folder in my desk. I decided to revisit them through one lens: what do I see in these photos?
My first approach centered around the moments the photos depict. The only picture in which the subjects consciously posed for the camera simultaneously captures the busiest background filled with shirts and hats that tell us the location is the 1994 World Cup. In trying to place the photos more specifically, we are in luck.
The tournament’s second quarterfinal featured Brazil defeating the Netherlands at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas, Texas, one of the great back-and-forth matches in World Cup history famous for Bebeto’s cradle celebration and Branco’s winning free kick. In all three photos, Brazilian and Dutch fans are visible while the stadium in the background can be positively identified as the Cotton Bowl. Our “moments” can now confidently be connected to one afternoon in Dallas, Texas on July 9, 1994.
With this foundation in place, more information about our photographer’s experience can be filled in. For example, referencing the flags visible in the background of one photo, we can determine that our photographer sat in the north end of the stadium. This means they had an excellent vantage point of the corner from which the Netherlands scored their first goal, but a limited view of Bebeto’s iconic celebration at the other end of the pitch.
Reading outside the edges of the photographs, we can also learn about the photographer themself. What impulses guided their camera? How did they experience this afternoon? Evidently, our photographer paid attention to social interactions, capturing instances of fans coming together even while others, such as the photographer in the bottom right-hand corner of the in-stadium photo, aimed their lens at the pitch. While the body language of the lone Dutch fan suggests a photo taken after the final whistle, the photo of the group of Brazilians is less definitive. Regardless, we know that at some point our photographer lingered outside the stadium documenting these interactions as well as the cultural and social rarities unique to a World Cup setting.
What can individually produced materials offer us that a match report cannot?
Reported narration and traditional match photography reflects a vivid reality of football as a binary of both spectator and spectated. The official records tell us that football is a game of individual actions. Bergkamp scored a right footed goal, and Branco’s free kick traveled 35 yards. Here are photos of Advocaat and Pereira directing their teams’ responses, here are frames filled with the faces of Romario and Overmars in glory and agony, and here is how a certain block of the stadium reacted to each of the above.
However, unless you are Bebeto, Bergkamp, Romario or Branco, the experience of the spectated in a stadium filled with thousands is something only very few can access.
What unites us as spectators is the act of witnessing.
Ephemera reflects this universality in a unique manner. It strays from a paradigm of ownership over story, narrative and history. Created under the assumption that official records will remember the actualities, ephemera presents an alternative to history making: it widens the frame to embrace the accidental along with the intentional, the subjective along with the objective and the personal alongside the general.
While we can only wonder what more might occupy the additional frames that compose this roll of film, we are still invited to make connections within the times and places we do have access to. Practicing this art of noticing can be as revealing about ourselves as the subjects of photos or the photographer themself.