Sonder

There is a word for it, though most people have never needed one.

Sonder — the realisation that every stranger you pass is living a life as vivid and complicated as your own. The man counting change has a father he is worried about. The woman waiting for the train is halfway through an argument in her head. Each of them is the main character, and you are the extra in the background of a story you will never be told.

It usually arrives once and then fades, because a city cannot be walked with that much awareness switched on. This series is an attempt to hold it open. The frames were made in markets, on trains, at temples, in the rain. I was not after expression. I was after the small gaps people leave inside their own routines: the second before the next order, the hand paused at the mouth, the head lowered over a table at the end of a shift. Work stops for a breath and something private moves into the space. That interior thing is the subject. Not the food stall, not the festival.

Most of the pictures put something between you and the person. Glass, bamboo blinds, monsoon, a car window doubled with reflections, the blurred back of somebody’s head. The obstruction is the point. Close enough to notice, never close enough to know. What I have is a fragment, and the rest belongs to them.

Two countries, one gesture repeating. A hawker leaning on his counter under hanging durians. A man walking out of festival fire with a towel around his neck. A woman alone in an aisle of lit glass boxes. A guard standing between two cones while the street moves around him. Different cities, same weight held differently.

The realisation does not resolve. It only widens.