Term: Issue 17: Reflections
Explore all pages categorised under the heading Issue 17: Reflections below.
All categories can be seen on the main index page.
Is he mourning? waiting? Are his eyes as tearful as you pictured? Are they fearful of the world to come without you? I’m sure he’d...
In Kolkata, heat arrived as silence, thick, smothering. The days clung to us, draped like wet cloth, the evenings stitched with the hum of cicadas,...
My friend and I are hanging out at Rockefellers, a popular cosy bar in Abakaliki. A half-outdoor-half-indoor bar. There’s no wall separating the inside from...
Echoes of Silence is a visual exploration composed of nine photographs and one video that examines stillness, memory, and emotional presence through a restrained and...
A pool and a reflection. Held down below the gentle, rippling surface. Hidden between the stabbing and persistent pulse of falling rain. Waiting to resurface.
For years, I admired and attempted to emulate deliberate street photographers. I walked circuits on the same blocks of New York, Paris, and Tokyo, waiting...
I have been walking this street the major part of my life. It is not remarkable, as places gain prominence by postcards or accolades. Its...
Neither Socrates, nor Aristotle – not even Plato – knows that in the contemporary folio a word, given a sail and a wind, corresponds to...
What you take from the ground doesn’t always give back.
Autumn is here, and the last and first time I visited the place was early spring this year. The blue domes hovered above the weather...
Near-noon sunlit County Sligo by Lough Gill, late August or early September. I unfolded out of the tour van, stood looking at the glistening lake...
The cows have spread out and I’ve counted fourteen. No, seventeen. Their heads hang low, they don’t need to look up Like us. Until they...
On a clear day in Adair County, all the sounds fit into boxes. There was a room for squares. What if we weren’t meant for...
I pledge allegiance to the moon & all the ghost stories for which she stands, the public light & shadows that make little claims. I...
At Kew Gardens, it rests in a shallow pool. Platen leaves radiate, nourished by cable-like stalks, centrally anchored. The palms are airy and colossal; the...
Dusk slipped through the broken fingers of the forest, where nothing grew but round, copper mushrooms shiny as dropped pennies, and shocking white constellations of...
Our days reach the perfection of fruit about to fall. Drifts of sunlight pile against the trees, and deep pools of shadow wait in their...
My first trip to New York City I wore black: black leather boots, black dress, black panties, black bra, black glass-bead earrings against cotton-white skin....
So little moves at noon across the flat pans of the Iranian desert. Below the surface, often a hundred feet, hand-dug qanats have veined water...
Did you know ginkgo trees lose all their leaves at once? And I could too Peel it off like yellow wallpaper.
Turn on the eel documentary for the second time think of your dead grandmother She could have been an eel, you know great, slinking goddess...
Bringing together over a hundred works, this exhibition celebrates Emin’s 40 years practice, you walk through Emin’s journalised, confessional life. Her very distinctive mark making...
The word samurai comes from the Japanese verb ‘to serve’. This exhibition, bringing together 280 exhibits, traces the evolution of the samurai image and myths....
After Freud’s death in 2011, the National Portrait Gallery was in receipt of his ‘works on paper’ in lieu of government taxes. One hundred and...
The key piece in this show is the vast ninety metre digital frieze documenting the Normandie seasons of Hockney’s own garden. A series of iPad...
Derived from the Bemba word meaning “a collective of storytellers” or “these stories will be told in the future,” Bakashimika International Photography Festival is more...
In the Tien Shan mountains, the temperatures can swiftly drop to –35° Celsius. If the sheep are out overnight, they will all die. An entire...
The morning did not announce itself as extraordinary. It arrived the way most mornings do—quietly, with the low hum of routine and the unspoken assumption...
At precisely four o’clock, with the sun preparing to slouch behind the sandstone bulk of the Allahabad Fort, I stepped waist-deep into the Ganga at...
A young guy in suction-cup jeans and laced-up white high-tops stares at me, then glances down, then briefly looks ahead as if sending Morse Code....
Ducking underneath a dehydrated llama fetus, I stepped into the shop. The table out front had beckoned, piles of earthy powders, amulets, and bowls of...
In Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Patio Door with Green Leaf,” a small, yellow-green leaf floats in front of a brown-red adobe wall, the colour of earth, the...
On the bus ride down the east coast of the South Island, the jagged shape of the Alps retreated into the distance on their southwesterly...
Most people don’t move into a house they’ve never seen. If not a tour, then at least some photos, but I had neither. It was...
If you want to know what history smells like, arrive in Budapest in June 1991: paprika and pastry, diesel fumes and a faint whiff of...
I had one mission on my summer trip to Miami: numb my mind in warm waves. With other tourists, I boarded the boat, the only...
I was searching for a farm underground, and I could not find it. My mother and I spun around Sangdo Station in a cloud of...
It’s one thing to learn the facts of a tragedy—on March 16, 1988, Iraq carried out a chemical weapon attack against the Kurdish city of...
Sitting at the café at the edge of the world, you watch the ferries, like hulking metal beasts, lumber across the Irish Sea to Dublin....
In a field overlooking the Thames estuary and the coastal plain close to where I live, is an inconspicuous cluster of small concrete structures and...
I was commuting an hour each way to culinary school, working as a local hospital cook, and owed the landlord cash-only for the month at...
The 1967 Avion Tourist trailer of my dreams lies in the small community of El Prado, New Mexico, within Taos County. I didn’t have to...
This morning, I kissed you at the train station where we parted for the day, and I thought how the world whips past – good,...
I had once coordinated counterterrorism operations in a place where bombs went off every other week. Today, I could not transport groceries. I’d spent twenty minutes...
The house I grew up in was built inside an almond orchard, and once the house was built, along with hundreds of others, there were...
The ice beneath my feet is blue-green marble, ancient and impossibly cold. I’m standing on Matanuska Glacier on a cloudy August, one of thirty tourists...
“During peak spawning, you can’t miss them,” I tell the group gathering at Plumb Beach. “But even when they’re not here in massive numbers, if...
I can’t pinpoint when I first started thinking about vultures, but I think it may have been when my husband informed me that a family...
I lay awake in bed under a 15-tog duvet and the crushing weight of loneliness. It was nearly 2 a.m. The street outside was as...
I was already halfway across the bridge when I realised I had forgotten lunch again. The Arno slid past beneath me, the colour of oversteeped...
Lizzy’s backyard was rocking like the beats from her rickety headphones. She had a lawn the shape of the sun and blue flowers that grew...
My bestie, Malita and I were having breakfast in our open balcony of our Paradise Island House in Polwi, when she startled me with a...
“Time holds the fate. of me and you / The mirror lies but the images are true.” I used to laugh at these words, etched...
The man in orange asked. It was after midnight when I took the garbage out to the street to throw it in the trash can....
The laminated pages stick to my fingers. “Kaffee mit Bailey’s, bitte.” My tongue trips over words that no longer fit in my mouth. Twenty years ago,...
You can’t own Lisbon. You only rent her breath. João scrapes mildew from the kitchen tiles of his uncle’s old flat, the blue glaze flaking...
He sleeps beneath the closed bank, counting breaths like coins. Yesterday he wore a suit and signed approvals; Today the city erases him. When the cough came, the...
He signs the treaty at dawn, ink steady, face calm. By noon, the bridge will fall and the convoy with it. Everyone trusts him; that is the...
At dawn, Ayo crawls from the burned kola grove, the only man breathing. The militia’s boots still echo in his skull. He tastes ash, counts names like...
Nora met Javi when he bumped into her with the still-lit end of a hand-rolled cigarette. At first, Nora thought someone had spiked her with...
Evan had hoped for a relaxing three-hour train ride on the scenic route from Aberystwyth to Birmingham. He knew he could not expect the same...
One of my recent lovers told me that what happened might well have happened without the intrusion of Arthur Beamish. But how could it have? In...
Far away from here, in the northernmost part of the province, where the forest gives way to tundra, there still exists an old village where...
In between rows of Victorian houses painted in greys and beiges that blended in with the concrete of the streets and the parked cars sat...
The road trip was meant to be fun. It was, for a while. Then the excitement faded, and all that was left was ourselves. Nothing...
On my very first visit to Café Bagatelle, clutching a beaten copy of Homage to Catalonia and a notebook in my right hand, the heavy...
A patch of flat, scorched earth wedged between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait turns east like a falcon’s head to shriek at the Gulf. In...
They shove off together barefoot with no plan, a couple fearless Huck Finns. New love is always built on the kind of trust you put...
We passed through Homs, then headed west into the hills toward Draykeesh. I’d been in the country for three months, and it was nearly spring,...
Walked roughly southwest this morning, down Market Street from the bay in the crowded well-appointed business district of San Francisco. Lovely weather; wishing it were...
Protesters lined the perimeter of the conference centre holding signs in Spanish: No queremos menos niños. Di no al control poblacional. We do not want...
I went to a beach on the California central coast just to feel like I was on an island again. As the marine layer cleared,...
Rainy season in Jakarta—the kind of downpour that soaks through your clothes, doubles their weight, and leaves you sweating before you’ve moved an inch. I...
I found a B/W photo of us from 1963 taken at a protest march in front of a federal building you’re wearing sunglasses slacks ...
Every time I drive through Washington and Oregon, I get nostalgic. Pine and fir trees cover the hills, snowcapped peaks in the distance—the classic Pacific...
[NEW YORK, MARCH 2003] — In the beginning I traveled in the hushed hours between midnight and dawn. I savored the quiet that fell over...
If there was anything Grace’s life had taught her, it was that love wasn’t a given. It could be taken away. Once she was no...
It was towards the end of May. There had just been a sandstorm, and Dad’s car was covered in dust. He was washing it, and...
He’s full, but the Hunger remains. Always. The need to gorge, as sharp and primal as fear. A rampant desire that only the threat of...
See all contributors to Panorama’s ‘Reflections’ issue and their bios below.