Varanasi, India · 2018
Silent Vow
The gold had been pressed onto his skin so evenly it looked beaten on rather than painted — a flat sheet of it from the hairline down, with a single red mark running between the brows.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
He had wound the yellow cloth high and tight. Everything about how he had prepared that morning said it was for the practice, not for me. I happened to walk into the end of it.
He said almost nothing. I have met sadhus who talk and sadhus who have set talking down for a while, and he was the second kind. Not cold. Just finished with it, the way you are finished with a thing you have decided you no longer need.
I photographed this man twice that winter, in two different places. This is the first frame, against the old brick. The other is at a blue doorway, his hands full of beads. I did not plan to find him again. Varanasi is large, and then suddenly it is not.
Here he is only looking. Past the lens, slightly, at something over my shoulder I never turned to find.
— 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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