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To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, a chair is a chair is a chair… and to paraphrase George Orwell, some chairs are more chair-like than others. No other piece of furniture is more redolent of the human body (although our pet animals – cats and dogs – are also fond of sitting on them). Beds, too, evoke people, but their horizontality brings a whiff of death. Chairs are for the living (although Norman Bates, in Hitchcock’s Psycho, installed his dead, mummified mother on a rocking chair). Chairs, like people, have arms and legs, even shoulders and a back. You move them around, as you do with people. An empty chair is not a mere object; it also testifies to an absence. A chair, unoccupied, seems to be sad, which is why photographers have been so keen to capture tenantless chairs on film. A jilted lover like Jean Harris (murderer of Dr Tarnower, inventor of the Scarsdale diet) could say that she felt like an “empty chair”.

Jorge Calado