India · 2016
Mother
The child was asleep against her and she was not going to move, photograph or no photograph.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
This was at the edge of the fairground, where the families camp during the Pushkar mela — tents and rope and smoke behind her, the whole temporary city that goes up once a year and comes down again. She had a nose ring and a printed shawl and a baby folded into the crook of her arm, and she met the camera with a directness that had nothing soft in it.
I did not ask her to pose. There was nothing to arrange. She was already doing the one thing she was doing, which was holding her child, and she simply let me be there for a moment of it.
One frame. The baby never woke. She never smiled. I have always been grateful she didn't — the photograph would have been smaller if she had.
— Sefa Yamak, Istanbul-based portrait photographer. Pushkar, Rajasthan, autumn 2016. From the INDIA series.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm · Signed & numbered on verso · Certificate of Authenticity included
If this photograph interests you, write to me directly. I'll answer any questions about print sizes, paper, and process. Studio visits in Istanbul are also available.