Just Walking Around

Doing and Feeling as One Does

One person’s privilege is another person’s jail.
One person’s slum is another person’s freedom.

I sit in the financial district of Hyderabad eating toast that won’t fight my stomach.
Glass towers hold air conditioning like a promise.
Security guards stand in clean uniforms.
Wi-Fi hums.

Two streets away, tin roofs hold heat like memory.
The same sun hits both.

And I am in between, talking shit about the machine while letting it feed me.

Who am I?

The tech hub feeds families.
The tech hub displaces families.
The slum suffocates.
The slum shelters.

Every structure is both wound and medicine depending on where you stand.

And I am standing everywhere and nowhere at once.

As a photographer, nine times out of ten I want to not exist.

To dissolve.
To be the invisible eye.
To let the scene breathe without the gravity of my body.

But my body insists.

Black.
Hair reaching outward like it refuses containment.
Camera slung across my chest like intention.

In some parts of India I can find African faces.
But they speak dialects my American tongue does not know.
They come from lands my feet have not touched.

So even there, I am almost.

To be and not to be.

Sometimes I wish I were a painter.
To return to the room and reconstruct the feeling.
To not alter the air simply by standing in it.

But that’s fantasy.

The painter wrestles too.
Every medium has a body.
And mine happens to be visible.

The problem of the artist might be to state the problem.

How do I contend with existing in a body that changes the very scene I am trying to witness?

How do I photograph without rearranging the air?

Maybe the only honest answer is this:

I don’t.

I accept that my existence is already part of the frame.

And that sometimes the art is not disappearing.

It’s enduring.

There’s something hauntingly beautiful about the unrelenting wave here.
Motorbikes.
Tuk-tuks.
Cars.
Bodies.
Noise that never fully exhales.

As an American man not on American soil, without the padding of that institutional architecture, something becomes clear:

You are nobody and nothing but love.

In the back of a car, watching through glass, I can feel it.

Nobody.

And then I step out with the camera.

Suddenly, nobody becomes somebody.

Somebody becomes spectacle.

The world shifts because I shift it.

The irony is cruel and tender at the same time.

The art demands presence.
The soul longs for disappearance.

So I keep walking.

I keep trying to let the body and the camera dissolve into what is.
Sometimes it works.
Sometimes the stare is louder than the shutter.

But I try anyway.

Because daring to dare is the work.

The conscious lonely road is still the only road.

Not because it isolates.

But because it asks you to carry contradiction without collapsing.

Glass and dust.
Privilege and jail.
Slum and freedom.
Nobody and visible.

Just walking around.

Doing and feeling as one does.

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