Visions of Gideon · Limited Edition Fine Photography

I hadn't planned for this. I stopped the safari jeep on a quiet morning in Mudumalai Forest and stood in the kind of silence that feels larger than you are. The forest was still waking. Skeletal trees receded into fog in layers, each one fainter than the last, until the mist took over entirely. I raised my camera, but I didn't fully understand what I had until I saw it on a larger screen later.

That's when it stopped me. A peacock perched on a distant branch I hadn't consciously noticed. The architecture of bare trees dissolving into grey. The whole frame felt like something half-remembered… present and already receding at the same time.

I named it after Sufjan Stevens' song Visions of Gideon. Not because the forest has anything to do with lost love, but because the feeling is the same: something briefly witnessed, something you keep looking back at, finding new things each time that make the looking ache a little more.

This photograph exists in an edition of 15. Not because editions are expected, but because some moments deserve to live in only a few rooms.