India · 2018
The River
He had folded himself down onto the bow until there was almost nothing left of him but the curve of a back and a turban.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
Knees up, head down, arms wrapped around his own shins. The boat was not going anywhere. The sun was doing the long slow thing it does over the Ganges at the end of the day, the whole sky going the color of the inside of a shell.
I was on the deck behind him. I did not ask him to look up and he did not. There is a kind of tiredness that is not unhappy — the tiredness of a man who has arrived everywhere he was going to arrive and can finally put his head down.
One frame, from where I sat. To make it I had to accept that I would never see his face, that the photograph was a back and a river and a sky and that this was enough.
It was enough.
— Sefa Yamak, Istanbul-based portrait photographer. Varanasi, winter 2018. 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.