Varanasi, India · 2018
Ash and Light
The white had dried and cracked across his forehead like the bed of a lake in the dry season.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
He had put it on at first light — the broad field of ash, the red circle pressed into the center of it. By the time I found him the sun had been working on it for hours and it had broken into a hundred small islands. He had not touched it up. He wore the wear of the day on his face without minding it.
Behind the glasses the eyes were doing something the rest of him was too dignified to do. They were laughing. Not at me, I think. At something older than me. The lenses were thick and scratched and absolutely necessary, and there was something I loved about that — a man who has let go of nearly everything and kept his glasses, because what else can you do about your own eyes.
I moved in close. He let me. Brown skin, white hair, and that red circle going to pieces in the heat — I wanted all of it, exactly as the day had left it.
One frame, maybe two. He was still half-smiling when I lowered the camera.
— Sefa Yamak, Istanbul-based portrait photographer. Varanasi, winter 2018. From the SADHUS series.
Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag 308gsm · Signed & numbered on verso · Certificate of Authenticity included
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