Fragments of
a moving world.
The Man Who Fed the Desert
It was five in the morning when the bus left Marrakech. Nobody spoke much — we were twenty-something people from different countries, colleagues for the week, strangers in every other sense. The kind of group that forms around a shared destination and dissolves just as easily. By the time we reached the Agafay Desert, the sun had just started its work. And there, in the middle of nothing — no road signs, no buildings, no reason — someone had erected a tent the size of a concert hall. Tables dressed in white. Coffee already brewing. A welcome that made no geographical sense and yet felt, somehow, completely earned. He was one of the first people I noticed. Moving through the crowd with quiet authority, a plate balanced in each hand, navigating the space as if he had always known it. There was something in his posture — not pride exactly, but a kind of ease that comes from knowing your role and owning it completely. I raised the camera. He never looked up. The desert stretched behind him in every direction, vast and unbothered. Some photographs are hunted. This one simply appeared.
A Man and His Patience
We had woken up late that morning — the kind of late that only happens on islands, when the heat gives you permission. Kastellorizo had that effect. Three hours by ferry from Rhodes, small enough that you learn its rhythms by the second day, quiet enough that you start to hear your own. We had just finished breakfast at the harbour front, coffee still warm in our hands, waiting for the boat that would take us swimming. The kind of waiting that doesn't feel like waiting at all. That's when I saw him. An old man at the edge of the dock, fishing rod in hand, entirely alone and entirely unbothered. The whole harbour was moving around him — tourists, boats, the particular chaos of a summer morning — and he was simply not part of it. Not removed, not distant. Just elsewhere. Present in a way that had nothing to do with the people nearby. I raised the camera before I thought about it. He never looked up. I don't think he noticed me at all. Some people have that quality — they exist so fully in their own moment that the world becomes background. The hook was in the water. The light was perfect. And somewhere behind us, the boat was coming.
Where Silence Has a Wingspan
Where Silence Has a Wingspan For years, it was a running joke among us — that one day we would ski the Alps. We said it every winter on the slopes of Vigla, the mountain above Kastoria where we studied, where the lifts were slow and the runs were short and the coffee at the top tasted better than it had any right to. We meant it the way young people mean things: completely, and without a plan. Then, somehow, the plan existed. Three of us, five days, the SkiWelt. We arrived with the kind of energy that only old friends carry — the shorthand, the shared history, the ability to be completely comfortable in the cold at six in the morning. It was the second day when it happened. We had been up since dawn, and by midday we had made our way to the summit — to the chalet up there where the air is thin and the world below stops making sense in the best possible way. We were standing outside before lunch, not really talking, just looking. The Alps do that to you. They make conversation feel unnecessary. That's when they appeared. Two paragliders, from nowhere, drifting across the valley below us in absolute silence. Colour against white. The slow, deliberate movement of something that has decided to trust the air completely. I had the camera in my hand already. Some moments give you just enough time.