Photography cultivates a certain awareness and attention to detail. You walk on the street, all senses awake. There’s this detail here and that situation over there. You can see things developing into something that could be a good photo. You anticipate. You position yourself in the right place and wait for the right moment.

Sometimes (in fact, many times) that place was far from being the right one. And the right moment passed before you could react. Or never arrived. But the experience is still yours to enjoy. It wasn’t pointless.

Attention is probably one of the most undervalued capacities we have. I mean, we all use it in a rather rudimentary form. But what it can provide, if cultivated and developed, is nothing short of miraculous.

This week’s Lens-Artists challenge, hosted by Donna, focuses on Messages. I’ve chosen three moments, each with its own message. Obviously, the message can be expressed by a symbol, an image, or a text. But a message can be present in any given situation in the absence of obvious symbols, images or texts, once we understand that situation, know the context and attach meaning to it.

I’ve chosen to illustrate this point with three moments. All of them require a certain attention, patience and interest to notice the details, know the context, and reveal the story behind it.

The first one is from Budapest. It’s memorial right on the left shore of the Danube river. There are women’s shoes, men’s shoes and children’s shoes too. They sit at the edge of the water, scattered and abandoned, as though their owners had just stepped out of them and left them there. The memorial was built in 2005 and was conceived by film director Can Togay together with sculptor Gyula Pauer. It honour the Jews who were massacred by fascist Hungarian militia belonging to the Arrow Cross Party in Budapest during the Second World War. The victims were ordered to take off their shoes (as shoes were valuable and could be resold by the militia) and were shot at the edge of the water so that their bodies fell into the river and were carried away.

The second one is from Lisbon. Although the official patron saint of the city is St. Vincent, the most popular saint by far remains St. Anthony. It’s him that you will see represented on many old houses, for protection and good luck.

St. Anthony was born in 1195 in Lisbon. He is considered the patron saint of couples and he blesses weddings. He also protects amputees, animals, elderly people, poor people, oppressed people, expectant mothers, boatmen and fishermen, travelers, and harvests. St. Anthony seems to be the one everyone can turn to in times of need or despair and the same one everyone can celebrate in times of joy.

The third one is from the south of Belgium, at the border with France. This countryside footpath extending into the distance towards a farm is actually the border. Belgium is on the left side, France is on the right.

Funny little things these borders. Depending on where you find yourself in the world, you need the right documents to cross a border, and you may risk your liberty and life for crossing a border without the right permit. Sometimes, that permit is so hard to obtain that the only real options are to spend your life within those borders or to cross illegally. And what do you do when life within those borders becomes unbearable?

But here, close to Chimay, the place where Belgian trappist monks brew their beer, the border is just an administrative detail and a line on the map. The old customs premises are now abandoned, a message from a not so distant past. It’s a message about the power of human conventions, including political arrangements, about how to divide territories and people from one another.