Varanasi, India · 2018
Returning
In profile the dots on his face made a kind of map — white points scattered across the cheek, the brow, down the bridge of the nose, in a pattern only he could read.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
The cigarette was almost out. He held it the way men hold a cigarette when it has stopped being a pleasure and become a punctuation, something to do with the hand between one silence and the next.
He had told me, before this, that he went home once. After many years on the road he walked back to the town he was born in, to see his mother before she went. He stood in her doorway. She looked at him a long time — the paint, the matted hair, the years stacked up on his face — and did not know him.
Then she said the name he was given as a boy.
He was not looking at me when he told it, and he was not looking at me here. The smoke went straight up in the still air. This is the frame I made after the story, in the quiet that comes when there is nothing left to add.
— 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
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.