The Life Ahead

In the midst of a journey toward a destination that is not yet entirely familiar, the travelers’ gazes are directed forward, toward what lies ahead. The photographer, however, has turned around. With her back to the future, she looks instead at the suspended present between past and future. Perhaps she is trying to capture that moment of transition—one that she herself once experienced. That movement back and forth between memories of a place left behind and the imagined destination toward which one is traveling.

Time seems to have come to a standstill, perhaps so that something of what is taking place inside the migrants’ minds might seep through onto their faces. Familiar emotions come to mind in the midst of a profound change: worry, anxiety, hope, and longing—a thread of thoughts that gradually forms a story, the screenplay of life in a new environment. A screenplay that will never become a film exactly as written because life is full of unforeseen events. And yet, sometimes, some of us write that screenplay because it is the only safe image we have amid the sorrow of leaving behind the people we once knew and the fear of a situation—and of people—we cannot yet fully imagine or understand. I, too, try to excavate my memories of the places I once left behind in an attempt to come closer to imagining the experience of those who appear within the frame although such an attempt is perhaps destined to remain incomplete.

Only the child’s gaze, at the edge of the frame, does not stretch out and engulf us. His gaze is not a stare. It is brief, an instantaneous reaction to the photographer and the camera, which seem to have appeared unexpectedly, leaving him at once curious and annoyed.

The others are staring—staring at the road ahead, at the photographer, or through the window. The suspension between two places and two periods of life is prolonged by the photograph. Unlike time itself, it does not pass. It remains. A suspension filled with imagination, hope, and plans. The imagination, hopes, and plans that people so often once held for a life in their own homeland, among their own people—until, sometimes, it simply becomes impossible.