Becoming a Mystery to Oneself- I

In this series, “Becoming a Mystery to Oneself” , I photograph landscapes from the
North Central Province—the dry zone, the plains. I began with bare, barren
landscapes captured under moonlight. In contrast to what we pass by in our
day-to-day lives, under moonlight the stillness becomes vast.

As the moon brightens through its phases, shadows emerge softly, blending into
their surroundings. The moonlight adds a mystical glow to the landscape—casting
shadows, not the ones like sunlight creates but rather painting the whole scenery in
one colour pallet like a monochrome, while the rest of the landscape sinks into a
quiet, dark vastness.

When I was under moonlight, I came to the realization of what Emil Cioran describes
as cosmic loneliness—not a personal or individual loneliness, but an awareness of the
world’s isolation, of an objective nothingness. It felt as though the splendor of the
world had vanished, leaving behind a silent, abandoned landscape, now a secret.
As I was looking into this landscape in a lucid, dreamlike state, I wanted to bring in
something. So I tried to place my body in this landscape, captured it in a photograph
which was an act of erotic presence according to what I realized as absurd. This to
me has been a mystery all along. Merging the cosmic loneliness and the absurdity of
my sexuality I formed these images.