2015 Photo Contest, Daily Life, 2nd prize

What Remains

Photographer

Sarker Protick

19 May, 2014

John wears his grandson’s bowler hat.

Failing health keeps the photographer’s grandparents, John and Prova, housebound in their old age. Life has become contained in a single room. The photographer had been very close to them as a child, but although he could visit daily, he found he soon ran out of things to say. One day he was struck by the way the light coming into the room was washed out between the white wall and the white doors. At that moment, the photographer says, he could relate what he was seeing to what he was felt about John and Prova’s silent, suspended lives. Hair turns gray, the paint on the walls begins to peel, all that remains are objects. In the white light, John and Prova’s lives appear slow and bathed in an aura—almost as if they are at the gates of Heaven.

About the photographer

Sarker Protick

Protick’s works are grounded around the ideas of time and space. Hovering between corporeal and meta-physical, his use of light as protagonist creates a truth that is more emotio...

Technical information

Shutter Speed
1/10
Focal length
35.0 mm
F-Stop
2.0
ISO
800
Camera
Canon EOS 5D Mark II

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