Playing Among the Rubble
Many works of art begin with a wound.
They invite us into rooms filled with loneliness, anxiety, estrangement, and loss. They ask us to linger beside what is broken, both in the world and within ourselves. We have become so accustomed to this way of seeing that it can feel almost like the artist’s sacred duty: to uncover the hidden sorrow beneath the surface of things.
And perhaps this is necessary. Suffering deserves a witness. Grief deserves a language. The shadows deserve their share of attention.
But not every truth lives in the shadows.
I have spent years admiring photographers such as Martine Franck, Fred Herzog, William Eggleston, Minor White, and Thomas Merton. Much of their celebrated work—with perhaps the exception of Merton—probes the loneliness, anxiety, ambiguity, and quiet dislocation woven through everyday life. Their images remind us that beneath the surface of ordinary existence lies a deeper, often more complicated story.
Yet when I created this photograph at the Malik Ghat Flower Market in Kolkata, India, I found myself drawn toward something else.
Three little boys were playing among piles of rubble, only a few feet from the colorful, intoxicating, bewildering chaos of the market itself—a world overflowing with tuberoses, roses, and marigolds destined not for dining room tables, but for temple offerings. Around them was noise, commerce, devotion, beauty, and disorder. Yet in the midst of it all, they were simply playing.
When I pressed the shutter, I wasn’t trying to expose a hidden wound. I was trying to preserve a glimpse of something easily overlooked: joy surviving in unlikely places, innocence persisting amid complexity, tenderness emerging from apparent disorder.
This image will never hang in a museum. It will never be offered for sale. In some ways, it is a shy self-portrait—an indirect attempt to say that the most bewildering aspects of my personality, those that so often occupy center stage, are not the whole story.
I seriously doubt that most of my friends suffer from having too rosy a view of themselves or of others. Most of us have little difficulty recognizing our shortcomings, our failures, our fears, or the ways we have fallen short of our own hopes. The more urgent task, it seems to me, is rescuing the smaller and more fragile parts of ourselves: the hidden capacities for tenderness, kindness, wonder, generosity, and simple decency.
We long for others to see those parts of us. We long for them to be known and cherished. Yet they are easily bruised, and so we often keep them tucked away from view.
Which is why there is something quietly liberating about this photograph.
It reminds me that beneath the rubble—beneath the anxieties, uncertainties, ambitions, disappointments, and carefully constructed identities—there remains a small child who still wants to play. And perhaps that is true for all of us.
Somewhere beneath the noise and confusion of our lives, something small and tender is still at play.
