Pantone’s Colour of the Year 2026 was announced five days ago. A few days before that, writer and literary agent Anna Sproul-Latimer predicted, “Even if I’m wrong, whatever it is, I’m sure it’ll speak to our collective longing for revelation in nature.” As per Latimer’s predictions, this year’s chosen colour was revealed to be a shade of off-white, a balance between warm and cool tones, like the clouds. Simple. Yet, not that simple, it turns out.

After the announcement there was a frenzy of online discussion around the colour choice. Each year, Pantone relies on a global team of colour specialists to choose the shade, drawing on influences from fashion, television, design, art and sporting events. This year, the colour was been called ‘tone deaf’ during an increasing time of white nationalism and supremacy, ‘disconnected’ from creative practice, ‘unimaginative and boring’ and ‘dystopian’ by analysts, trend forecasters, some news outlets and commentators.

Eyes down, between nappy changes and folding the pram, lifting and aching under the clouds dancing, I found the online debate both laughable and sad.

Cloud Dancer: the colour of a blank page, icy magnetic poles bookending our planet, a cloud before the storms roll in, milk which nourishes the weakest and most vulnerable amongst us, summer lightning refracting energy and power, light — the sun, which rises on us all each day (though we probably don’t deserve it). She mentions all of these in some way. Nature. Longing. Collective.

How fractured we are, our human race, to take a colour — not created by us but merely found and named by us — and weaponize it, dissect it and debate it, rather than simply delight in it. How fractured we are to begin with categorisation instead of curiosity and to wield power instead of giving it away, surrendered. Forget the debate about Cloud Dancer signalling nationalism - isn’t this how racism starts?

How fractured we are, that racism even exists.

The irony isn’t lost on me that the frenetic online debate contradicts Pantone’s desire for the colour to reflect simplicity and quietness amid hyperactivity; stillness for a world on the move; peace when countries are at war.

The backlash alone highlights how a neutral colour can become politically charged because of our current cultural climate. I don’t deny the significance of this. But doesn’t it also speak to other kinds of reactions that sit within us too? Perhaps Cloud Dancer is a prompt to lift our eyes higher than ourselves, maybe even, higher than the earth we stand on.

Interestingly, one 2020 study1 found that almost half of the 4,500 people surveyed from 30 different countries*, associated the colour white with relief. Are we that hesitant to look away from our screens, walk outside, raise our gaze and surrender?

Eyes lifted: white, in many cultures outside of our Euro-centric ones, symbolises the presence of God – holiness stooping to humanity, heaven bending to earth, love and power entering our aching world. In some Amazonian cultures, white is made from natural materials like grey clays and crushed shells and symbolises purity and spiritual power. In ancient Rome, Romans wore white togas as symbols of citizenship; it meant they belonged to a collective bigger than themselves. In many cultures, white symbolises purity, a value that our culture cannot quite seem to articulate anymore.

Language is shaped by what we see, and our language also determines how we see. In 2006, a remote people group from Namibia called the Himba were asked about the colour green2 During the research, a group of Himba people were shown a collection of twelve green tiles. Eleven were the same colour and one was a different shade of green. They were asked to choose the tile that looked different to the others. I looked at the tiles and I didn’t immediately see a tile that stood out. The Himba found it immediately. Their language has multiple words to describe the colour green. When the group was shown another set of 12 tiles, with 11 green and one blue, they were unable to pick out the single blue tile. In their language, shades of green and blue all fall under the one word. The research concluded that language undeniably affects the way we see — or don’t see — colour. Himba eyes can see a shade of green that I can’t. I can see a shade of blue that Himba eyes can’t pick out. If our language shapes what colours we notice, perhaps our culture shapes what colours we resist? Would someone who is Himba or Berinmo or Burmese object quite as much to Cloud Dancer white as our own cultural critics have?

Eyes lifted : we see the clouds that give us rain to water our crops which feed us. We cannot control them. We cannot touch them, unlike the devices we hold every day. Surely any colour is inadequate to express the ache and longing of our human hearts or our daily existence on earth. Maybe we need to remember that a single colour cannot feed the hungry or stop a war, and surely — if anything — colour should make us feel more human and more connected to each other?

Scientifically, white isn’t a single wavelength: It’s a perception of all light, or a mix of colours; white is the presence of all colours. Talk about metaphor.

A scripture from my faith tradition about seeing generously comes to mind: ‘If you live with stingy, ungiving eyes your body is as dark as a dug-out, white-washed tombstone, but if you open your eyes in wonder, your body fills with light.’3 What is on the inside of us needs more attention, more love, more gentleness, Christ is saying.

In the online articles about Pantone’s Colour of the Year, most of the people opining or offering critique and those quoted are in positions of pay, power or influence, and most are speaking from Euro-centric or English-speaking cultures. But what about those who aren’t interviewed? I think about Princess, a girl who lives between tombstones in a large slum in Manila. Meeting her challenged many prejudices I held about people living in poverty, or people facing hunger, or people who are illiterate. One was that people living between tombstones wouldn’t take pride in something so small or basic as having a clean T-shirt. Yet, Princesses’ clean, bright T-shirt billowed the colour of Cloud Dancer.

In my subtitle, I quote Laurie Pressman, Vice-President of Pantone, who responds to critics of the colour choices’ racial undertones, explaining:

“Skin tones did not factor into this at all. With Peach Fuzz and Mocha Mousse, people were asking if this was about skin tones. And I think we were going, ‘Wow, really?’ Because, for us, it’s about, at such a basic level, what are people looking for that colour can hope to answer?”

The question circles me these past few days.

Caitlin Napier from Marie-Claire Australia ends her article, Unpacking the Controversy Around Pantone’s 2026 Colour of the Year by asking,

“…in the current political climate, where race, identity, and nationalism are such charged issues, can a colour so intertwined with historical and social significance truly offer the reprieve Pantone envisions?”

We all need reprieve. We all need relief.

Maybe Cloud Dancer reveals the rest that we didn’t know we needed.

In August 2011, one month after South Sudan announced their independence from the North, I sat in a briefing at the UN Headquarters in Yei, South Sudan. Behind white-washed walls and protected by roaming peacekeepers in sky blue helmets, I felt safer than I had moments earlier, even outside of those walls. Days earlier, a rebel faction had declared a ceasefire agreement with the government. Outside of the gates, peacekeeping vehicles roamed the streets, muddied by thick dust rising from the roads. The soil of the youngest nation on earth clung to the vehicles, dirtying them shades of orange, brown, red, almost hiding them from view.

I have written before that war leaves nothing untouched, even a strand of hair.1 The first colour of Landrover Green, also known as Light Green, wasn’t so much an aesthetic choice as a necessity2 – there was a surplus of this colour available after World War Two as it was no longer needed to paint Royal Air Force planes. This reference is one of many, I’m sure, that show the consequences of war on the colours of everyday life in technology, employment, farming, fashion and our own homes.

We have all been watching war, lately. We are hurting for others but often unable to help. We are begged to act but feel that our actions are a drop in the ocean of state-funded, powerful transnational decisions. We are asked to bear witness, but our eyes and bodies are bound in specific times and places. I recently told a photojournalist friend after seeing a harrowing video clip: “I’m lost. What can I do?” She expressed that she felt the same and suggested that we must keep listening and talking in a way that humanizes people — at the very least. Language brings colour. She also told me that it’s okay to weep.

Everywhere we look, our chequerboard minds divide us.3 With limited space and time, we, as lookers and image-viewers, can clutch at simplifications. We are numbed; expecting reality to fall into the stereotypes and categories we have created, closed off to unexpected beauty and colour and variance. Overwhelmed, our minds (and vision) skips to black and white: Good versus evil, rich versus poor, the past versus the present, the migrant versus the refugee, us versus them. It’s easier to view these dichotomies as stark opposites instead of mingled, messy, time-consuming intricacies – much like the dirtied underbelly of a white peacekeeping vehicle.

Psychologist, Dr Kevin Dutton, In Black and White Thinking, The Burden of a Binary Brain in a Complex World, writes:

“Life works because our brains are black and white. But wisdom lies in knowledge of the grey; in the deeper understanding that although, as cognitive grandmasters, we are destined to play the game, the squares on the board, indeed the very board itself, do not exist.”

In Dutton’s book, he writes about meeting an extreme negotiator, Claire, who worked in China (she speaks Mandarin), Pakistan and Islamabad. She’s one of a small number of women to have ever negotiated successfully with the Taliban. Extreme negotiation, she says, is actually about building relationships. To communicate appropriately, understanding must come first. Claire tells the story of a school deep in the mountains of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: one day, a woman ran to the school and informed two teachers that a section of the Taliban opposed to the education of women were heading their way. A class of thirty three girls was gripped by fear. The teachers calmly guided the girls back to their villages. The women stay put. Some half an hour later “when a squall of boots descend on the school yard, they serve up basins of rosehip and cardamom tea and saucers of barfi and laddu.” They put the commander and his men at ease, showing them around the classrooms and playground and inside store cupboards. They ran through the curriculum and explained to the commander that by learning to read and write girls will be able to better progress their Islamic studies. The next morning, the school bell rang across the mountain pass and the girls began their first lesson of the day.

I love this account because I don’t know if I could ever do what those teachers did. For a few simple moments, they challenged the us versus them divide; wisdom was found in the shades in between. Language and communication added colour. Understanding what mattered to the Taliban was important, and against daunting and dangerous odds, the teachers’ courage and creativity saved the school, and possibly even many lives that day.

This story also reminds me of an ancient scripture where Christ asks people to remember the chequerboard doesn’t exist : Give your coat to someone who wants to sue you. Pray for those who persecute you. Serve tea to your enemies. If those instructions make you angry; me too. Jesus is flipping justice and vengeance on its head. He models a shade in-between retaliation and a passive permission of evil. It sounds dangerous and risky because it is.

I have been raking the news for colour lately, but it’s hard to find. I have spent years noticing colour in some of the most vulnerable places on earth.4 Searching for colour and the ways that people express their creativity, imagination and care has kept me believing that the face of God is visible in anyone. Isn’t hate and hopelessness easier to find? It’s often easier to show too. Dignity and courage in the face of terror or extreme poverty or terror is what keeps me here. Not necessarily because I believe the whole world can be saved this way, but, I believe that maybe some lives can.

I will never forget meeting Wilson’s family who lived between tombstones in the Philippines. His family furnished their home with cups, baskets and chairs all the same shade of green, carefully collected over time. Did I assume the colour of life would be hard to find in the homes of those living between the dead?

I won’t forget Princess and her family, Wilson’s neighbours, who had nailed a small jar of toothbrushes to their bare cement wall. In a small alcove, too low for an adult to stand, next to a neat row of kitchen utensils hanging neatly on small nails, the container was attached to the wall. Inside were eight well-used toothbrushes, one for each member of the family. Here was strength in a cup – a daily routine of resilience on display in the fraying strands.

I don’t know why I was surprised that a family who lived in a graveyard brushed their teeth. Surprise often shows me that my prejudices are without proof. Had I really come to believe that people living in poverty would be dirty? Had I assumed that a family living between graves would not take pride in something so basic as teeth-brushing? Was my vision so skewed by the death and the dying, that I had forgotten that living consists of hours and minutes filled with tasks which bring us order, comfort and satisfaction? Did I forget that as created beings, we will always create?

I also won’t forget MawPaw*, a refugee from Myanmar, telling me about a seedling tree she planted outside her home the same week she had to flee her country and how she hopes to return one day to see how much it has grown. Did I forget that some refugees long to return home, but can’t? Did I overlook the stories of refugees who can and do return home for good?5

There is much in the world that leaves me reeling: all facts and no feeling, all faith and no fear, sings Brooke Fraser. I don't know why a good man will fall
while a wicked one stands, she writes. I don't know why our words are so proud, yet their promise so thin.

So, I’ll keep searching for a thousand shades – a tiny thousand mirrors of God’s light in the most unexpected places.

I’ll remember that war zones can become gardens within a single lifetime, like the one I photographed above.

If I am myriad, fickle shades of light and dark, good and bad, grateful and discontent in ways that are impossible to quantify, then I’ll pay attention to the limits of my own judgement.

In-between the default spaces of my black and white brain, I’ll ask for wisdom and for a third way, wondering if a ceasefire starts with me.

Maybe to keep searching for colour is to keep asking for it, hoping it exists in the dark.

Look for the colours too, will you?

Thanks for your patience, readers. Between my day job and parenting, my newsletter frequency has been much less than I’d have liked this year. But, as always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections. Is there anything you’d like me to write about next year? Let me know in a comment, note or message.

Share

Bonnya’s eyes sparkled as she skipped through her village in the tea-fields in Northern Bangladesh holding her friends’ hands. Dressed in bold red and purple colours, she led us home. We met her younger brother, Sukumar and father, Kanai, inside their bare-brick-walled, dark home, with few windows and doors, and tragically, a home now missing a mother. I was squinting to see. A simple sack of food of some kind was stacked against one of the walls. There was no furniture – one single mat, no electricity, no water, just moulded earth giving shade and shelter. Bonnya’s little brother was smiling and laughing for most of our visit, his dimples were pockets of tiny shadows on the curve of his shining cheeks. As Kanai reclined against the brick wall, stretching his legs out in from of him towards us, I noticed his naked feet, lacerated, bleeding and covered in boils, swollen from untreated infection.

How would I photograph Kanai with dignity? If I focussed too much on his feet then open wounds may define his whole body, and in listening, physical pain was not the loudest part of this family’s story.

It would be easy for me to cut his feet from the frame. I could focus on the strength of his back and shoulders and the way his arms guided his children to sit or stand or the way his protective eyes glanced around to see what his children were doing. Cutting hands and feet from a frame looks visually abrupt or can look like a technical mistake.

But here were the feet of a father who loved his children. Here were the feet of a father that were still standing, still walking, still providing for his family. Here were the feet of a man who had walked paths that I would never walk. Here were feet that were tools used up for others, not manicured or curated.

Our hands and feet share so much of our stories by showing so little. Our toes, fingers, wrists, and ankles can expose comfort, longing, awkwardness, peace, pain.

Photographers, photography critics and image theorists have, for decades, considered the juxtaposition of beauty and suffering. As a communications professional in the humanitarian sector, I spend a lot of time thinking about when, how and why we witness – or see, or watch – another’s suffering (I’m also plugging away at a book manuscript on the topic too).

Should the bleakness of pain – especially someone else’s pain — mix with the thrill of light or colour, inseparably, inside a frame? Especially if the frame doesn’t ‘belong’ to the same body that the pain belongs to? If so, for what purpose?

These questions have existed as long as photography and image-making have. The answers are complex, but most photographers and image-makers will have their own views on the discussion. Of course - there are also times when images must remain untaken. I hope my views don’t stay fixed but are influenced by the people I meet and each person’s unique circumstances.

There lots of images which inspire my thoughts on the discussion. Here, I’ll discuss two different images taken by the same photographer which help me consider and reconsider my answers to these questions. Both images were taken by American photographer Eugene William Smith. One showed a body in crisis, one resulted from a body in crisis. One was dramatically stark, one was mysterious – poetic, universal. 

Eugene Smith is probably most well-known for his photo, Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath.  The photograph caught the world’s attention in TIME magazine on 2 June 1972, highlighting the devastation caused by Minamata disease – a neurological syndrome caused by severe mercury poisoning in a city in Japan. Industrial wastewater containing methyl mercury from a chemical factory claimed thousands of lives, while the corporation responsible (and the government) did almost nothing to prevent the pollution.1

Tomoko was one of over two thousand victims of this poisoning. (Although later research states that the effects of the industrial pollution lasted longer and spread further than first believed, affecting tens of thousands of people.) Tomoko had been poisoned while she had been developing in her mother’s womb, saving her mother and siblings from further effects of the disease. She was born blind, deaf and paralysed and died at just 21 years old.

The image is hauntingly beautiful. Inside a traditional Japanese bathroom, mother Ryoko cradles her daughter, Tomoko. Tomoko’s eyes are illuminated by the 3pm light as she looks upwards – heavenwards. Her bony body is edged by light, and her skeletal limbs stretch almost the full width of the frame. The edges of the bathtub frame their relationship in this moment: the carer and the cared for, the helper and the helpless. This mother gazing at her child resonates with the timeless embrace of Mary and Jesus, Madonna and child. It feels deeply intimate. It feels ethereal. It feels dramatic. It feels almost other-worldly and yet sickeningly painful. 

How would I feel if my sister, my father, or my child was photographed like this? This is the question I ask myself in situations where taking a photograph seems like a brash insensitivity or intrusion, albeit one with full consent. How would I feel if this photo was shared with everyone I knew, and then a whole crowd of strangers? I look at Tomoko, and I wonder. 

It was an image for which Ryoko gave her full consent. This was an image she wanted Eugene to create and to share. It was an image made collaboratively, directed by both the participant and photographer. But it was also only an image – two-dimensional. Why is Tomoko sick? What disease is she suffering from? Who is this lady caring for her? The image doesn’t give us answers, even though, through other photographs and words, Smith did address some of these questions.

Smith wasn’t alone in his wrestle with the ethics of photographing the effects of Minamata disease—a type of mercury poisoning—during the 1950s and 60s. Many photographers represented the effects of this disease to advocate for justice for the victims. Japanese filmmaker Tsuchimoto Noriaki visited Minamata in 1965 and grappled with the same questions.2 Should the victims of this tragedy be shown as beautiful? Could he film subjects who were unconscious or unable to express their approval? 

In fact, Japanese photographers and filmmakers working in Minamata around the same time as Smith, including Tsuchimoto, criticised Smith’s photo, especially the fact that he had photographed a naked teenage girl, unable to give her own consent.

What Smith’s single freeze frame doesn’t show is that thousands of the disease’s victims were shunned in their communities for two reasons. The victims were either assumed to be contagious (How can an image show invisible prejudice?) or they were thought to be tarnishing the reputation of this picturesque landscape through their legal cases. These photos showed that beyond the stunning landscape there was a toxic pain – an invisible poison was infiltrating the land. Eugene’s photo made the effects of this poison visible to a global audience. His photos exposed the inaction of the very authorities who had the power to also protect.

The timeline is important to note. The Chisso factory first started producing methyl mercury as a by-product in 1951, although some reports say earlier. In May 1956 – five years later – the factory’s hospital director reported the discovery of the disease. By October 1956, 40 patients had been discovered, 14 of whom had died: a mortality rate of 36.7%.3

So, this was not news in 1972 when Smith’s photos were published in Time magazine. And looking at the statistics of human-caused disasters which occurred during 1956 and 1972, the Minamata poisoning was not the deadliest. The Nigerian Civil War, Congo Crisis, the North Yemen Civil war, and the Papuan conflict all happened during this window of time; the Papuan conflict continues today. Smith’s photo acted as a rallying reminder that justice had not been served; albeit a belated reminder.

Eugene Smith had not been the only long-term activist challenging Chisso corporation. From 1971 to 1973 (before, during and after the publication of Smith’s photos), Japanese man Teruo Kawamoto, a patient of the disease, orchestrated sit-in campaigns, setting up tent near the Chisso corporate headquarters. Many locals joined him.

It’s good to remember that while one single photo may have brought global awareness, the multiplicity of local, smaller actions were just as valuable in effecting change.

Although Eugene was not the only activist, it was largely his photos which sparked action around the world to help the Minamata community. Governments began creating policies and standards to increase seafood quality and to protect consumers from mercurial poisoning and Minamata’s disease. Tomoko’s photo also helped usher in an era of heightened environmental consciousness as citizens worldwide began realizing the connection between pollution prevention and human health. Smith’s activism led the Chisso Corporation and their employees to believe that an intervention was needed.

In 1973 – 22 years after the first official report of the disease – Chisso was found guilty of negligence, and comprehensive compensation payments began to the victims. Of course, this was only financial compensation; lives had been lost, families had mourned, communities had been tainted forever. But it was compensation of some kind. It was recognition. The victims were being seen and assured that their lives mattered, although their circumstances may have suggested otherwise.

The direct impact of this photo on Tomoko’s family was mixed, however, and towards the end of Tomoko’s life, almost wholly negative. The photo fuelled rumours that Tomoko’s family were financially profiting from the image. They asked that the photograph be withdrawn from further publication, twenty years after her death in 1997. ‘I wanted Tomoko to be laid to rest,’ her father said.

Aileen Smith, Eugene’s wife, who had lived in Minamata for years, said around this time:

Photography is neither medicine nor god, and the photograph … in spite of its release worldwide, could not cure Tomoko’s illness … Needless to say, after Tomoko's death, this photograph meant something different. It wasn’t about Tomoko anymore …4

I am grateful for Aileen’s words. She accepts the limits of a photograph to directly treat, cure or rescue somebody. This documented moment is – after all – merely a mirror reflection of a moment in time. What an image can’t do, she implies, is what a human, or God can do. She accepts the photograph’s meaning has shifted over time. She accepts that the original purpose of an image can be twisted.

After her husband passed away, Aileen also said,

‘This photograph would mean nothing if it did not honour Tomoko. This photograph would be a profanity if it continued to be issued against the will of Tomoko and her family. Because this was a statement about Tomoko’s life, it must honour that life and by it her death.’5

There are words in here which I try to hold to.

 A photo means nothing to if it doesn’t honour the person it represents.

A photo cannot be issued against the will of the person it represents.

A photo has the power to be a statement about someone’s life, so it must honour that life, even beyond death. To honour Tomoko’s life was to stop publishing the image. 

Here, I come to talk about a second photo of Eugene Smith’s, which helps me think about the relevance of beauty in representations of suffering. Taken in the spring of 1946, the photograph The Walk to Paradise Garden was one of Smith’s first photographs after he was severely wounded during World War Two. Caught in Japanese mortar fire, his wounds left him with shrapnel in his skull and left hand. He was unable to hold a camera for months. The Walk to Paradise Garden was the first image he took as he was recovering from his injuries.

It shows two small children walking ahead, framed by trees, pictured from behind. They seem to be holding hands and are emerging from the shadowy undergrowth onto a more well-lit path. The children look ordinary, unremarkable even, but the beauty of the light and shadow and framing are shimmering, almost magically. It is quietly intimate in a different way to Tomoko’s photo. Its intimacy is simple. Its universality is tangible.

As I look, just as I looked at the photo of Tomoko, I am aware that the power of three people intertwines in any form of image-making. Firstly, the person being represented. If this person is poor, oppressed, silenced (or even silent, like Tomoko) there is a heightened weight of power and privilege on the other two people in this trinity.

The second is the photographer, who is close in proximity to the person being represented. The photographer is likely well resourced (as they probably own the camera) and there is a chance they are not facing the same depth or shape of suffering as the person pictured.

Then, there is the viewer: someone separated by distance, race, social class or culture to the person pictured. The viewer is distanced but brought closer to the scene through the image.

There will be times when the person inside the frame is hurting. There will be times when, we, the viewers are also victims of pain or poverty. The recent Israel-Hamas war and our reliance on citizen journalism in a place where no other journalists can enter, has shown us that the image-makers suffer too. “I’m not just covering the news – I’m living it,’ said Plestia Alaqad.

I have come to realise there will never be a perfect equilibrium of power within this trinity. But that also doesn’t have to be a bad thing. A power imbalance may exist, but excess power doesn’t need to be wielded; excess power isn’t always bad. Afterall, only ‘power without love is reckless and abusive,’ said Martin Luther King Jr.

Despite his limitations, I believe that Eugene Smith created the image of Tomoko and her mother with love and care, not with recklessness.

The Walk to Paradise Garden displays another power imbalance between adult and child, yet the photo has a timeless beauty to it. We have seen these scenes in our own lives; children curiously exploring trees and bushes. It’s as if we’re somehow invited to follow and we watch from a distance. Smith said of the photo: 

As I followed my children through the underbrush and tall trees – what joy of discovery everywhere was theirs – and as I watched, I knew again that in spite of all of it, and in spite of every way, and over every setback, that today, now, I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it. (1954)

Smith’s eyes had been tarnished by war, and his body was now broken by it. However, this scene restored him in a mysterious way. I wonder if he was holding this memory – of both pain and healing – his own children in his mind, when he met someone else’s child, Tomoko, in Minimata years later.

It is these two images next to each other which somehow begin to answer the question I asked earlier about pain and beauty living inside the same frame. Both Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath and The Walk to Paradise Garden were taken by the same person, almost twenty years apart. One shows Tomoko, a child bathed in light, depleted, and needlessly dying. Another shows his own children, Pat and Juanita, stepping into light at the end of a shadowy tunnel, adventuring. One is a harsh rally cry to empathy and to action, the other is a quieter reflection on ordinary life. One is another’s experience; one is our own. One was made to benefit the life of another; one was made for himself. Both images reveal both pain and beauty in different measures, in different ways.

The effects of Tomoko Uemura in Her Bath effects rippled far beyond Minamata, but The Walk to Paradise Garden was deeply personal – ‘however unimportant to the world.’ One was made in a position of privilege and health; one was made at a time of helplessness and pain. ‘I tried to … ignore the sudden violence of pain that … shot again and again through my hand,’ Smith says of the moment he took The Walk to Paradise Garden.

There are more uncontextualized images in our world than ever before, but both of Smith’s images, in their beauty, reveal a little bit of what it means to be human; to have or to lose power, to witness and to feel pain, to illuminate a large-scale injustice or appreciate the tiny, pleasing moments of daily life.

Here is what I am sure of: both kinds of images are needed. Both kinds of images hold their own limitations. Both images involve the photographed, the viewer, the photographer in highly imperfect ways. Both kinds of images serve a purpose, both images have a season of relevance and honesty.

I wished to speak out a sonnet for life and of the worth of continuing and living in it.

I cried when I first read these words. There is only so much pain someone can feel inside their body or witness outside of their body before hope begins to fade. I’ve felt that lately, watching war.

If photographs can make us feel more human and less like God then they are essential. If we are looking, we wont always see the ‘transfiguration’ that Robinson talks of in the opening quote above, but we might. Can images bringing peace during conflict, alleviate poverty or heal pain? I believe there is still a chance they can.

If images can show us that there are dancing dimples not far from wounded feet, then we need them more than ever.

During the pandemic lockdowns, I read a story about Le Van Hung, a former deep sea fisherman in Hoi An, Vietnam, who had returned to the ocean in his small, woven boat. 

A storm had destroyed his family business onshore and he had no other choice left. He spoke of the need to bring in abundant hauls to support his family of six, “We hope,” he said, “but I never know what happens under the water.” Hung’s words somehow described, perhaps what each of was experiencing at the time—a scale of uncertainty that none of us could easily measure. Hung’s words described the invisible depths that held both his hope and helplessness. 

I thought again about Hung’s words recently, as we followed the stories of two groups on two very different ocean voyages. Five people on board OceanGate’s Titan submersible — rich, elite and able to freely choose their voyage — and another—of around 750 people, migrants and refugees. 

Of course these two stories are different; one story unfolded in real time, the other only met our eyes once the disaster had happened. But both groups faced the mercy of the ocean and human error, one group seeking survival and the hope of a different future, the other, because…well it’s hard to say exactly. 

One twitter user* wrote, ‘The Titanic submarine is a modern morality tale of what happens when you have too much money, and the grotesque inequality of sympathy, attention and aid for those without it. Migrants are ‘meant’ to die at sea: billionaires aren’t.’ 

Of course, the news coverage of these wreckages is hard to reconcile because it exposes the dramatic inequality of our world. 

Did we want the billionaires to die? Why were we transfixed as the hours passed? Can two different stories hold our gaze at once? 

Journalist Arwa Mahdawi wrote a helpful piece reminding us of why we were so captivated by the story of the Titan and its almost unbelievable absurdity compared to the shipwreck off the coast of Greece, ‘It’s human nature to feel overwhelmed by suffering at scale; it’s called psychic numbing.’ Research shows that as problems grow in scale, and more people suffer, our emotional response doesn't scale up.

I’ve written before about how seeing can sometimes be an escape and can stop us from responding. But seeing can also remind us that we are finite and we cannot be everywhere; our gaze becomes focussed: we can care, we can act. 

At the time of writing this it took me five internet searches to find the name of the boat which sank carrying migrants and refugees. She was called the Adriana, and departed Libya on 10^th June 2023, four days before she was wrecked, carrying hundreds of Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Afghans, and Palestinians. Over one hundred children were below deck. I wince, heavy, aching. 

Many moons ago, I wrote a research paper on the representation of refugees and asylum seekers in mainstream tabloid newspapers. Not a single source I could find at the time, included an individual photo showing the eyes of the person seeking asylum and introducing them by name. 

The photos showed packed out migrant boats, crowds arriving at checkpoints, lines of people crossing bridges, and fluorescent lifejackets piled up on beaches. Bodies without names. Bodies without stories. I was shocked at the Western news industry’s skewed limitations. ‘One dead fireman in Brooklyn is worth five English bobbies, who are worth 50 Arabs, who are worth 500 Africans,’ writes Moeller in Compassion Fatigue. 

We will have had our different reasons for being glued to the Titan rescue story: intrigue, doubt, ethnic affiliation, geographical proximity, horror,  anti-capitalism and ‘eat the rich’ sentiments, or simply longing for a happy ending. This story was unusual, and sadly an overcrowded boat with desperate people crossing the Mediterranean, isn’t. 

Research shows that news coverage exposes the connection between under-representation and prejudice, apathy and violence, between storytelling and survival.

In 2015, British Prime-Minister David Cameron told viewers of ITV that the French port of Calais was safe despite a ‘swarm’ of migrants trying to access Britain. It wasn’t the first or last time migrants and asylum seekers have been dehumanised with words. 

Our tongues, small though they are, hold immense power,

“A small rudder on a huge ship in the hands of a skilled captain sets a course in the face of the strongest winds. A word out of your mouth may seem of no account, but it can accomplish nearly anything—or destroy it!…By our speech we can ruin the world, turn harmony to chaos, throw mud on a reputation, send the whole world up in smoke…” (James 3 : The Msg) 

Poet Wang Ping, puts words to her experiences in the poem Things We Carry on the Sea, 

We carry our islands sinking under the sea…

We carry old homes along the spine, new dreams in our chests…
We carry yesterday, today and tomorrow…

And we carry our mother tongues

爱(ai)，حب  (hubb), ליבע (libe), amor, love

平安 (ping’an), سلام ( salaam), shalom, paz, peace

希望 (xi’wang), أمل (’amal), hofenung, esperanza, hope, hope, hope

As we drift…in our rubber boats…from shore…to shore…to shore…

What were those on board The Adriana carrying? Words (and poetry, I’ve found lately) can soften me towards curiosity, towards compassion. 

Shortly after the Adriana was shipwrecked, my sister sent me a video of two brothers reuniting, one of whom had survived the shipwreck. I watched, trembling at the words passed between the two of them and a third person nearby, and the love and loss that their conversation held. I was not only seeing, I was hearing.  In a brotherly embrace through barricades, I felt it. Amid confusion and fear: tenderness, an embrace, relief. 

A friend, aid-worker or journalist (we don’t know exactly who they are) nearby asks: 

Friend: How are you and how do you feel? 

Mohammed: It is a disaster, really. 

Friend: Just take it easy…please don’t cry. 

Do you know where we can find you and where exactly? 

In the Kalamata hospital. Is it just Kalamata or other places? 

Mohammed: Just this place….

Friend: We will come to see you there.  

But don’t worry. 

We are behind you all the way and we will support you in any way possible.

A question. A comfort. A promise. 

So as I write, I know that stories and words and time - really matter. 

I know that words – language shared between us – can mean the difference between life and death. I know I must write to feel my own humanity again.

If I narrow my gaze and understand my portion of power, where and to whom can I offer a question, a comfort, a promise? 

Hope, like a fisherman once said, is possible, even though we can’t always see, or understand, what lies beneath. He told me that hope and uncertainty were not incompatible.

- Eddie Jaku, former prisoner of Auschwitz.

Harsh, immovable rock to the left and to the right bordered my eyes; steep and valleyed, taller than I could see. The air was thick with humidity and my breath was shallow. I’d walked down 157 steps through a bamboo forest and was now level with Death Railway in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. 

In 1942, the Japanese Army planned to invade India but required a more direct overland route to transport reinforcements. So, in 1948, this opening through the rock was cut by prisoners of war and laborers, commanded by Japanese and Korean soldiers, using their hands and basic tools and limited dynamite. The Thai-Burma railway track, which would be later known as Death Railway, wound 415 kilometres, crossing rivers and twisting through mountains and was completed in 1943. It’s estimated that around 90,000 Malay, Chinese, Burmese, Tamil and Thai prisoners of war and labourers died constructing the railway. In the section I’m standing in, alone, 69 men were beaten to death by Japanese guards in the six weeks it took to build it, and many more died from starvation, exhaustion, cholera and dysentery.

At night, the workers’ torches would light up the rock walls, stretching and flickering their skeletal shadows against the walls they were digging. The monsoon rains and high temperatures threatened the health of already malnourished and overworked prisoners.

This path wasn’t made for walking, but for trains; not for enjoyment but for invasion. I see a tree standing in the middle of the pathway, surrounded by sloping walls of rock. It grew from stony ground; stark, slender and alone. 

Hope can be the size of a seed. A single acorn can hold a thousand forests; a tree now grows from the ground of Hellfire Pass. 

Even here, there would be stories of bravery and forgiveness growing from the dirt. Inside earthquake-shelters made from cornsacks and concrete-drainpipe-homes and shipping-container-clinics, and sun-dried desert-homes and swept-tombstone dwellings, dignity is alive. Even in these places, there are bodies, eyes, minds and souls defying death. 

Earlier in the year, I had travelled to a different part of Thailand to tell the story of a stateless baby in the borderlands; born invisible in many ways. Created images had, quite literally, saved her life: she had received surgery to correct her gastroschisis — a condition where the intestines grow outside of the body. I had watched as Patnaree took a small box of milk, and lifted the straw to her mouth. She sipped. She swallowed. She was alive.

Recently, I’ve noticed lots of discourse circling about the Christian theology of beauty. I haven’t delved into it, as I don’t think I can bring myself to narrow beauty’s definition into a theological box or as an isolated concept detached from the messiness or complexity of our world; our Crucified Christ binds beauty and pain inextricably. 

In 1943, Australian prisoner of war at Hellfire Pass and surgeon, Weary Dunlop, wrote in his diary: 

‘The morning and evening sometimes positively hurt with their beauty, especially the lovely quarter hour before dawn when the whole sky is aglow with brilliant crimson bands showing through the clearly etched foliage in a brilliant atmosphere and the softest of pale blue. Vividness and colours everywhere.’

To hurt with beauty, he wrote.

I am learning to pay attention to the surprises in the sorrow, like a surgeon who treats and touches tortured bodies but stays soft enough to paint the sky with his words.

Ray Parkin, another prisoner of war, and friend of Weary Dunlop’s was an artist who painted surprises with colour on paper. He was riveted by clusters of orchids, ‘salmon-yellow mackerel clouds’ and ‘smoky-blue ranges’ beyond the Kwai Noi River. 

One day, in his journals, Parkin wrote forlornly:

‘As I get to the top of the big hill, I look out and see between strong green and brown forms, the lovely blue of the rain-washed mountains with the sun back-lighting them. But I cannot absorb it in a real way. I know it is beautiful, but what does beauty signify?’

He sounds like a man at his physical and emotional limits. 

Yet, in Parkin’s marvel in his descriptions of the landscape, though he himself is in such dire circumstances, is a speck of hope:

‘A dull day with grey half-light – indigo, green and sepia. Whitish rags of low cloud skirting across the mountains, tearing themselves on the ridges. It is humid and we are hurling rocks down the hillside. Scraping them out with our hands … In spite of our situation, there is something here which is giving my heart a lift: perhaps it is the much good against which to contrast our little evil, giving a sense of proportion.’

The beauty of the landscape and his own optimism are intertwined.

Ray would collect butterflies that flew around the Kwai Noi river and its valleys. In fact, in February 1943, he was known to paint little else, naming and drying some of his finds, sticking them to the ceiling of his hut with splinters of bamboo. Here was order, fragility, and an appreciation of colour in the hands of a man crushed by forced labour; here was curation and delight in a place of depravity.

I am absorbed by one of Parkin’s paintings from his time as a prisoner, showing what he nicknamed as a ‘Will O Wisp’ beetle. It’s open wings spreading out in an array of colour, ‘blue dappled, speckled, lined and patched, with a red body and a remarkable upturned horn of lake-red,’ as Ray describes the colours in his journal. His layered words match the rich hues of his palette.

I am still figuring out exactly why this drawing has become so significant to me. It’s partly that this drawing is a testament to human resilience; this small creature offered Ray a chance to reclaim some of his humanity and creativity in a place where humans were treated like animals. 

It’s also a reminder that we live inside a juxtaposition of scale - of colourful insects and of war, of a global pandemic and an eyelash resting on a child’s cheek, of a newborn and a sprawling refugee camp, of tsunamis and a wasp sting, of cyclones and a dust speck dancing in the sun, of rainbows and a nose freckle.

Ray’s beetle drawing from Death Railway has become a sort of symbol for me – that I am at once entirely out of control; helpless and limited and unremarkable — sometimes a prisoner of things outside of my control — and yet I am still here, full of specificity, colour and purpose. So is the person living on the other side of my beliefs - or my garden fence – or my country’s borders. 

His sketches were eventually concealed and transported inside a false bottom of Dunlop’s operating table. I enjoyed learning this fact; I smiled at the thought of the painted butterflies lying next to the sketches of exhausted bodies. Discovered beauty and the darkness of brutality – both together – both carried and rescued inside the surgeon’s workspace. 

Butterflies and beaten bodies; vivid, shocking, anomalies.

In fact, another of Ray’s paintings would save someone’s life. When the war was finished and Ray’s prison camp was liberated, a commandant let the men he was supervising walk around. Ray was able to pick leaves, flowers, and butterflies. Ray drew a picture of the camp and gave it to the commandant, thanking him for his kindness. Many of the commandants were later executed for their war crimes, but the recipient of Ray’s note was spared. He had a small painting from Ray Parkin—evidence of his character— to present in his defence.

In the midst of death was life. 

Walking through Hellfire Pass and seeing the Will O’Wisp painting also reminds me of one of my favourite stories about the Ten Boom family in Holland.

During World War Two, Corrie Ten Boom and her family, motivated by their belief that all humans bear the glorious image of God, hid Jewish people inside their home, sheltering them from the persecution of the Holocaust. They were eventually caught by German guards, who sent Corrie and her family to concentration camps where they faced hunger, violence and despair. Betsy and Corrie were prisoners at Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany, and Betsy, already weak with lifelong health problems, endured beatings from the guards and eventually died in the camp, aged fifty-nine.

Before Betsy’s death, she explained to Corrie that she had received a vision from God that, after their release, they would own a concentration camp. It would be a place where German perpetrators, hardened by hate, could learn to love again. In Betsy’s vision, the barracks were painted green and had window boxes filled with flowers and plants. ‘It will be so good for them, watching things grow. People can learn to love, from flowers,’ said Betsy. ‘We must tell people what we have learned here,’ she explained to her sister. ‘We must tell them that there is no pit so deep that He is not deeper still.’

Even though it seemed impossible for Corrie at the time, Betsy could see something that Corrie could not. She could see beyond her present suffering. She could see colours yet to be.

The Ten Boom window-boxes symbolised a defiant truth : no pit is deeper than God’s love — beauty’s Source. 

The Will O’ Wisp and butterflies could fly free, unlike the artists who painted them or the soldiers who watched them. 

Don’t we all need to see that something unexpected can grow along Death Railway? 

As always, I love hearing from you. Feel free to leave feedback, comments or reflections.

Mae La Refugee camp, Thailand (2019). Many residents of Mae La fled armed conflict in neighbouring Myanmar.

We remember the images. In August last year, Afghans flocked to Kabul airport to flee the imminent Taliban takeover. Fathers, husbands and sons, clung to the side of an aircraft as it took off from the runway. The footage was called ‘shocking’ and ‘extraordinary’. 

It was so disturbing that the US Air Force offered psychological support to staff onboard the flight and at Kabul airport. 

It was hard for us all to look, but not many of us looked away. 

As the footage was shared and re-shared across social media platforms, a common sentiment rang out, as it often does when imagery narrates such chaos, “Imagine if this was our family fleeing.” or “We’re so lucky to live in [place] where this wouldn’t happen. Hug your family tight tonight. I’m so thankful we’re all safe.” 

A few months later, images flooded our vision again when Putin’s armies invaded Ukraine. Cradled in the palms of our hands or flickering around our homes, we watched as crowds crossed borders, buildings were bombed and families fled. What if this was happening in our country— our neighbourhood? Which belongings would I pack? Would I be strong enough to carry my children?

We wondered. I wondered. 

We insert ourselves into the scenes we see. It’s a natural impulse, but I’ve learned that sometimes it’s far from helpful, because we are not at the centre of every story.  Why do we find ourselves vicariously grieving, although it is not us, in this case, who are bereaved? Why, exactly, are we re-sharing scenes of someone else’s desperation? Does our watching dignify the people who we are seeing?

As a photojournalist and not-for-profit humanitarian storyteller, who believes that a single image can change the world,  I spend a lot of time thinking about when, how and why we witness  - or see, or watch - another’s suffering. In fact, I’ve been writing a book about sight (and splendor) and suffering. 

Image theorists and photojournalists have debated the depiction of suffering for decades and maybe I’ll delve into some of those perspectives another time. By now, we know well that you don’t have to search far to find images that are dehumanizing, exploitative and that reinforce prejudice. 

Yet we also know that sometimes someone who is suffering wants to be pictured, because the suffering is not all there is. In a moving story told by writer Ocean Vuong, he recalls the moment a photographer met him as a child with his mother, 

“Three cups of rice for that photo. We were in a refugee camp, and we got rations. And each day, each family got three cups of rice. And there was a photographer who went around — even in a refugee camp, it’s a microcosm of the world…so I wanted for my first book to have Vietnamese bodies on the cover that were living…and so that photo was a moment of salvaging and preserving bodies in transit. What was it about these women, I thought, that [they] would surrender their very sustenance, in order to preserve their image?” 

There are times when people pictured during war, conflict, persecution would prefer their image —a slither of time, frozen—to endure, to reach across divides, to ask for help, to document, to prove, to validate and to testify.

An image can also be a signpost saying: pride and hope are here, even if they are hiding.

Ngarambe Rukambika, 49, and his nine-month-old son, outside a hospital in Masisi, North Kivu, in August 2008. Published 21st November 2008, Cedric Gerbehaye/The Independent Newspaper

C.S. Lewis reminds us against the powerlessness that comes with vicariously witnessing someone else’s pain, 

 “I think each village was meant to feel pity for its own sick and poor whom it can help and I doubt if it is the duty of any private person to fix his mind on ills which he cannot help. This may even become an escape from the works of charity we really can do to those we know. God may call any one of us to respond to some far away problem or support those who have been so called. But we are finite and he will not call us everywhere or to support every worthy cause. And real needs are not far from us.”

Seeing can become an escape. Seeing can stop us from responding. Seeing reminds us that we are finite. Seeing reminds us that we cannot be everywhere. 

I have too often mistaken my own perspective as another’s’ or another’s perspective as my own. I have often mistaken a compulsion to look as a substitute for genuine engagement or meaningful action. Susie Linfield in A Cruel Radiance writes about this, referring to photographs of people inside prison camps, 

“One can mourn the people in [Lubyanka and S-21] - one must mourn, know what happened and when and how - but that should not be mistaken for closeness. We are not inside those prisons: they were. Our hells almost certainly are not theirs…We cannot become the prisoners of S-21 any more than we can save them…it would be good to eschew a knowledge that is easy, an identification that is glib, and a resolution that is cheap.” (p.59)

Photojournalists are responsible for the ethics of showing, says Linfield, but we are all responsible for the ethics of seeing.

At worst, our sight becomes black-and-white, us-and-them, or (what I call) they-are-me. We slide into voyeurism, condescension and over-identification. We erase nuance. We fix our eyes on that which we can do nothing about; becoming paralysed by a constant state of compassion fatigue. Seeing becomes an answer to our questions instead of a way to ask questions. We forget that images do not explain. We offer a ‘resolution that is cheap’.  

Ironically, by seeing so much we can also end up ignoring the people who want - or need - to be seen.

There will be times when our gaze stretches too far and we harden our hearts to the needs just beyond our doorstep. 

But, at best, our eyes can lead us to better learn, and to better honor and dignify others. At best, images help us to know who it is that we see. Our eyes can bring light to what is hidden in darkness.  Seeing can lead to truth, justice, rescue, restoration and healing. 

Maybe we watch, because deep down, we wish the suffering we see simply didn’t exist. We watch, waiting for a resolution, for justice, for vindication. 

It’s complex isn’t it? 

Maybe it’s not right or wrong to wonder how someone else’s life may be similar or different to our own. 

Maybe it’s not right or wrong to look away. Maybe it’s not right or wrong to be a bystander. 

Being an eyewitness sometimes changes the world, but sometimes being an eyewitness counts for nothing; George Floyd was still murdered, the plane still took off with people clinging to the wings, Putin still continues to invade Ukraine.  

Looking means that we are participating, somehow. Looking away doesn’t have to mean that we are denying someone justice. Sharing an image on social media may directly help those pictured, but it also may not. Images can remind us that are many ways to care. 

Monitoring the media might lead us to solve ‘some far away problem’ in unexpected ways, but it doesn’t neccessarily make us more safe. 

So, is there a right way to watch war?

I am learning to live with the tension of sight— with both its power and powerlessness— as much as I am learning how to live in peace while the world is at war. Learning to live with this tension is like learning how to tend a garden on a planet with rising sea levels and drying deserts.

Seeing itself is paradoxical; it is at once both clarifying and incomplete. It is both unquestionable and yet fleeting, fragmented.

Maybe embracing these tensions is the antidote to weariness. Maybe critiquing my gaze will soften my heart more towards lasting, honest, unseen, local, care for my neighbour. 

When Putin’s war against Ukraine was waged, I could only bring myself to look at Iona Moldovan’s photographs Lives in a Suitcase which focussed on one family carrying one suitcase across one border one at a time. I roll their names around my mouth in prayer while I do the dishes. Olga. Divia. Max. Leonid. 

Maybe learning the name of one person, or sitting with the words of one family, or praying for one person pictured, or following up on one story after the headlines have moved on—  can actually change something. 

Maybe, to come full circle, an image can help us care for someone far away, and maybe, an image can also help us love our families well. 

As Mother Theresa once said,  "What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family.”  Whoever, or wherever we count our family to be. 

The memory hasn’t faded with time: I am five and sitting in the back of the car, journeying along a specific road in South-West England. My home county hills rest on the horizon, looping and bending, just like the cursive handwriting I am learning in school.

We roll past Romani caravans, country manor houses, solitary walkers, farmers harvesting and as we drive, I picture the landscapes around me, pressing onto the printed pages of a book. I see snapshots framed by my car windows, like polaroids. Each frame is a story.

I feel all at once a crushing urgency, a longing to write, and a sense of loss as the scenes roll past the car windows. The photographs flutter from the windows in the breeze.

Before starting The Honeyeater Press, I had only really ever consistently written for my own eyes. But in my mind, I am writing all the time. As I roll past the scenes of my life, I am writing. Even if the words are not rolling onto pages, they are rolling on and on, in the hills of my mind, pressing onto pages.

But it is self-serving to hoard volumes inside of me that I am too unconfident to present to others? After all, if the hills of my home shine with God’s creative artistry, then somewhere too easily buried in my heart, I know I do too. I have always written and I will always write. But readers –the chance of risk, critique or rejection - bring fear.

Who will read what I write? Maybe I will write for the people I see inside the frames. Maybe I will write for those who are journeying with me. Maybe I will write to remind myself that my flickering windows reveal only one perspective.

Creators are also residents. Of course, our words and our stories are bound up in our communities, our worldviews, our nationalities, our ethnicities.

Our creations are formed by the places we call home. As well as being shaped by physical or geographical spaces, our creations are shaped by time too.

During the Black Death in Europe, tracts were handed out with the words, “Whoever wishes to keep himself healthy and fight against death from pestilence should flee anger and sadness, leave the place where sickness exists, and associate with cheerful companions.” Contrary to literature before it, entertainment and laughter began to be welcomed into art as a mechanism for healing, Larry Jiminez shares. The genre of modern fiction was born.

The Arab Slave trade to the East Coast of Africa which began in the 9th century, brought the smooth tones of Arabic to the staccato Bantu words of East Africa. Slavery and trade would irreversibly shape the vocabulary and language of the region long before colonialism distorted local languages with English.

In North Africa, Somali poets are obliged to support their clans using carefully chosen words recited orally by heart. Their poetry is integral to societal function, becoming a spoken persuasion to others. It often is a recitation of history, claiming honour and acting as an advocate for their communities.  

Up until the Second World War, Japanese poetry followed the strict fixed forms of the haiku and tanka. But it was somehow insufficient, or impractical at least, to capture the grief and trauma of a generation marked by mortality. Free verse or gendai-shi emerged, marked by surrealism and metaphors. It would be this poetry which expressed anti-war sentiments in the 1960s and was used to portray the devastation of the Great Japan Earthquake in 2011.

As we have seen the rise of digital information over the last decade, the average human attention span is easily exhausted; it is now only eight seconds long. Micro-blogging with restricted word counts has challenged printed newspaper industries, and readers all over the world.

Inevitably, time and place shape the words that are thought, written and spoken. We know this to be true from our everyday conversations.

It’s for this reason that I think it is almost impossible for a global resident to create outside of an earthly identity, a citizenship or a nationality. As created beings, whether we acknowledge a Creator or not, we know that words ties us to the land - to place - in some way.

We are residents of a globalised world and we live by national rules. Our citizenship ascribes a value to us which we cannot choose.

What if my freedom to create as a writer and as a photographer, was defined by my government? The idea haunts me, but it is a common reality for the world’s artists. I have only recently experienced, during the pandemic, what it means to be physically bound by borders. But I do not know what it is like to carry the assumptions or artistic limitations borne by a citizen of Iraq, or North Korea or Mexico.

I have wondered if answering “Yes” to the question “Are you a writer?” would become its own set of borders. Would my words now belong to another? Would calling myself a writer detract from my own delight in creating? Would I have to live up to creating and producing consistently - instead of just observing from the passenger seat? But, then, I reason, isn’t an artist’s true delight discovered in serving others? I don’t need to write for everybody. I just need to write for somebody.

In Pilgrim’s Regress, an allegorical exploration of Christianity, C.S. Lewis writes, “Be sure it is not for nothing that the Landlord has knit our hearts so closely to time and place – to one friend rather than another and one shire more than all the land,” and I think about my Landlord-Author, who knitted together the hills of my home and my mind. Limitations aren’t always unhelpful.

Our hearts are knitted in some ways that we cannot untie. It is no coincidence that the thousands of pages I have written in scrapbooks and sketchbooks and across my thoughts are tied to a certain time, to a specific place, to someone, somewhere.

Now, as an adult, when I find the time to write, my heartbeat quickens in excitement. I am collecting polaroids which I thought were lost forever in the wind. I am not creating alone but as a citizen, surrounded by others. I am following a map that is not of my own making (thankfully). I am accepting that my body is bound by time and place, by borders beyond my control, and somehow this is liberating.

So, here I am sharing, even when fear or perfectionism may try to stop me. It helps that you are here with me too— with your own landscapes and your own tales fluttering from the windows of your eyes.