Varanasi, India · 2018
The Reader
He was holding a child's school notebook up in front of his face — 'Education' on one page, a printed photograph of snow mountains on the other.
This story imagines, it does not document. It is what the photograph made me feel.
Classman brand. The kind sold for a few rupees outside every school in the country. He had it open with both hands, ash-grey fingers, a heavy ring, and he was reading it the way you read something that matters.
Behind him a painted Kali looked out over the top of the page, blue-faced, tongue out, hung with tinsel and bells. In front of him: laughing schoolchildren and a mountain range he had almost certainly never seen. I don't think I have ever found a stranger or more honest picture of this country in a single frame.
He was Aghori. The bells on his body said so, and the ash, and the leopard cloth, and the particular way the people on the ghat had left a space around him. They go where the rest of the tradition will not — the cremation grounds, the things others look away from.
He did not lower the notebook. He did not look at me at all. I made one frame and left him to his reading, and I have wondered about it ever since.
— 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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