Torn wedding photos strewn on Jurong street

AN UNUSUAL sight greeted Madam Wu Rong and her son when she was taking him to school on Monday morning .

CLOSE-UP: A closer look shows the pictures are of different couples. PICTURES: LIANHE WANBAO

Strewn on the pavement, grass patch and the road at Jurong East Street 32 were numerous torn wedding photographs.

The 41-year-old housewife told The New Paper in Mandarin: 'There were at least 100 photos and it was strewn over a 100m area.'

The first thought that came to her mind was that it could be the result of an ugly divorce.

That's what she told her son, 8, when he asked her what she made of the strange sight.

'I told him that maybe a couple had broken up and that they were having a tough time,' said Madam Wu.

SCATTERED: The torn pictures on Jurong East Street 32.

But she later realised that the photos had different couples in them. She then called the Lianhe Wanbao hotline.

'The streets were really untidy because of the photos - they were everywhere,' she said.

So how did the photos end up on the streets?

According to a cleaner in the vicinity, a bag of trash had fallen off a garbage truck.

The cleaner told Wanbao that the bag, which contained the torn wedding photos, fell off as it was not tied up properly, and the photos fell out of the bag.

There were also dozens of name cards of a wedding planning company.

When The New Paper contacted the company, a man who identified himself as the manager and who gave his name only as Mr Chai, said one of its female employees, who lives in Jurong East, could have taken the wedding photos home.

He said the torn photos were 'rejects' from its clients and were meant to be disposed of.

A check with wedding boutiques found that some of them print photos to show their clients.

'Sometimes, our employees take work home, and this was one of those occasions,' he added.

According to him, this is the first time an incident like this has happened.

'We will discourage our workers from taking work home from now on,' Mr Chai added.

A spokesman from the company told Wanbao that it shreds rejected photos in a shredding machine.

If the photos are too big to go into the machine, they would then be cut up so that their clients' faces cannot be identified.

A wedding coordinator, Ms Abbey from My Bridal Room, told The New Paper that its practice is to cut out the faces of their clients or use a penknife to scratch out faces before throwing the photos away.

'Our policy is to make sure our clients cannot be identified in the photos we throw away,' she said.

Mr Gordon Ang, 32, director of Wedding Matters, said the company usually returns rejected photos to the couple or to the photographer.

'We don't keep any photos at all, unless it's for advertising purposes,' he said.

Jovita Chua, newsroom intern