When I was younger, I wanted to be a writer and, in the last year before the collapse of the USSR, I was in Prague taking “visual notes” to inspire my writing and support my memory. One day, I came across the face of an older man, so ambiguous and beautiful. From this moment, things were reversed and images became more immediately tangible to me than words. That said, photography is also about creating a narrative, and my approaches to both writing and creating images share similar predilections. I certainly prefer allusions to descriptions. I love ambiguity.
I cannot imagine going somewhere without reading up on it first. I’ll visit Google Maps and Google Earth and try to imagine the streets, but of course the reality is always a surprise, with nuances I haven’t anticipated. This was taken in Lahore, to where I have returned almost every year for a decade. When I first came to Pakistan, I was overwhelmed and puzzled, but the country and its people grew on me.
