Accidentally appearing in a photo with your future partner

Saturday 24 August 2019, 13:13 by Elvira Smit | 4,683 views | 2 comments

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

Almost all my photos contain things I only really noticed later, once I got home. In Mrs Xue's case, there was something in her photo she only saw 11 years later: her future husband.

Photographing your future by accident

In 2000, Mrs Xue was travelling with her mother. They visited 4 May Square in the Chinese city of Qingdao and took a snapshot that would then lead a rather dreary life in a scrapbook.

In the 11 years that followed, Mrs Xue fell in love, got married and had twins. All that time, the photo book containing the picture stood in her mother's cupboard. Until it was taken out by her husband. He leafed through the photo book, probably slightly bored, while wondering which of his twin daughters looked most like him.

And then suddenly, he saw himself standing in the photo. He had unintentionally appeared in someone else's picture. And that someone had since become his wife. In short, he had been transformed from an annoying blemish in a photo into the life partner of the unknown woman whose picture he had ruined at the time.


Naturally, Mr Ye eagerly went looking at home for his own version of this moment. He was not just hanging around there, he was also being photographed. It seems that the photos were taken at practically the same moment, judging by the man's pose.

Time in pieces

A well-known 'trick' in photography for guiding the viewer: as soon as you see objects together in one photo, you automatically look for a connection between them.

We look for little stories, sometimes even seeing them in a simple repetition of shapes. You expect a relationship (here's another example). That expectation is fully met in the photo of Xue and Ye. Albeit with an 11-year delay.

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