Who, What, Where?

I've written about 'time' and 'narrative' in photographs before [blog posts passim], and I would like to offer this picture in illustration of the ambiguity of the photographic image if unanchored from immediate or known contextual experience on behalf of the observer. Dapper young man in a suit sat casually on a monument to  Queen Victoria [where?]; two women in conversation pass by in front of him. Who in this picture is the subject? Is there any relationship between those featured? Is there a story? Who made the image in the first place? Is this just random street photography? The fact that I know part of the background to this picture gives me partial knowledge of the 'reality' of the image. I know who the young man in the background is, which grounds the narrative perhaps a little. I suspect with reasonable certainty that the two women in the foreground are simply 'there' by accident of happenstance. But what I don't know is who took the photograph of the young man and what relationship they had with him. Again, an open narrative. We live in a world of automated AI-driven image and text manipulation which creates falsity from 'apparent' reality; but dive back into the very analogue world of the silver halide image and there is still much ambiguity and room for interpretation in images 'orphaned' from their context, albeit founded on the real. All I know for certain from the above image is that the young man pictured is our late friend Ronald, photographed, I would guess, in the 1950s. The rest is open to interpretation...