There is a particular kind of quiet that only exists on planes. Not silence… never silence, but a hush made of shared breath and the steady hum of jet engines holding us up. Everyone becomes briefly anonymous. We are suspended between places, time zones, beginnings and endings. Suspended between versions of ourselves.
I took photographs on a recent flight over the Atlantic on my way to see my family. The pictures are simple: a window, a wing, a seam of light. Clouds stacked like thoughts I couldn’t quite complete.
When I looked at them later, I realised I wasn’t just photographing a fiery sunset. I was photographing the act of crossing. The feeling of being unmoored and held at the same time. That familiar in-between state where time stretches and collapses, where your body believes one clock while the world insists on another.
Clouds are the perfect subject for this kind of looking because they refuse to be pinned down. They are always becoming, always undoing themselves. You photograph them and the image pretends to be stable, but you know it isn’t. You know that what you really photographed was an instant of form, an arrangement that will never repeat.
It made me think, again, about how rarely I photograph “home” head-on.
Most of the time, when I photograph home, I’m not pointing my camera at a house or a street sign or a skyline that proves where I am. I’m looking for smaller evidence. The quiet markers. The things that carry history without announcing themselves.
Home, for me, has never been a fixed address. It’s a collection of departures and returns. A handful of memories and recognitions. A language I learn and re-learn.
When I’m photographing home, I find myself returning to the same three themes.
The places where people repeat themselves
There’s a kind of emotional weight in repetition. The more something repeats, the more it begins to mean, not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s true.
The chair that’s always used, even when there are other chairs.
The same spot by the window.
The corner where someone irons, prays, smokes, scrolls.
The side of the table where our loved one always sits, as if the body has claimed it. A place the body returns to without thinking.
Repetition is where the everyday becomes personal.
It’s also where memory hides in plain sight. You don’t notice it while you’re living it, until the day you return and everything is slightly rearranged. Or you look back at your photographs and realise you’ve been circling the same gestures for years, building a private map without meaning to.
On that plane, I watched people sleep in the same positions, shoulders tilted towards the aisle, heads leaning into the crook of a neck pillow. Someone turned a page, again and again, in the cabin’s soft half-light. The repetition felt tender. It was life insisting on its patterns, even at 35,000 feet.
When I photograph home, I’m always listening for that insistence.
Objects that behave like anchors
Some objects don’t simply sit in a room. They hold it together.
A plate that has outlived several kitchens.
A curtain that keeps returning in new flats, as if refusing to be left behind.
Shoes by the door, quiet proof of who comes and goes.
A scarf, a prayer bead, a book with a cracked spine, a keychain that has travelled farther than it should have.
These objects aren’t valuable in any official way. They’re valuable because they’ve absorbed our lives. They’ve witnessed us. They’ve taken on the weight of touch.
In my own life, there are things that feel like small compasses: heirlooms, scraps, details I’ve carried between countries. Sometimes I photograph them directly. Other times they appear at the edge of the frame, doing what anchors do: grounding the picture without asking to be the subject.
I think this is why I love photographing the textures of home. Paper. Fabric. The patina of everyday use. The things that hold fingerprints and time.
A photograph doesn’t stop time, it can’t. But it can hold a mark left by time. A bruise. Evidence that something touched you.
On the flight, the window became its own kind of anchor: a frame inside a frame. It made the world feel both intimate and unreachable. I couldn’t step into that sky. I could only witness it. Press my forehead close, look, and let the camera carry a small part of what I felt.
The line between inside and outside
This is the one I return to most. Windows. Doors. Thresholds. The places where the world changes temperature.
Home is often made visible at its edges.
The moment someone steps out to the balcony.
The pause before a door opens.
The way a curtain lifts with a passing breeze.
The shadow a doorway throws onto a floor at a certain hour.
Thresholds are where you feel the tension between belonging and leaving.
Now, I notice thresholds everywhere. On planes, the window is the ultimate threshold: you’re inside and outside at once: present and distant, held and untethered.
I made a photograph of my own reflection in the glass: faint, almost accidental, layered over the clouds. The camera caught it better than my eye did. In the image, I look like a ghost hovering above the Atlantic, watching myself cross.
That’s what photography does sometimes: it shows you what you couldn’t see while you were living it. It gives you a doorway back into your own experience.
A post-script on home & belonging
Home isn’t only warmth and nostalgia. It’s also access. It’s who is welcomed and who is watched. It’s who gets to move through a space without explanation, and who is made to feel like a visitor.
These aren’t separate from our visual decisions. What we choose to photograph, and what we leave out, often carries that charge. Sometimes the most honest photograph of home isn’t a wide shot that proves where you are. It’s a detail that admits what it feels like to be there.
The warmth and safety of home is what I long for most.
To live in-between is to become fluent in thresholds. To understand that belonging can be temporary, negotiated, revoked. And still, to keep returning. To keep looking. To keep making.
— ⟡ —
A song for this piece:
Dialogue, Akin Sevgör
Listen on Spotify
An invitation
Make three photographs of “home” without including a house or building.
Repetition: a gesture, a spot or a pattern someone returns to without thinking.
Anchor: an object that wouldn’t mean “home” to anyone else, but does to you.
Threshold: the line between inside and outside, literal or emotional.
If you’d like to share, reply with one image and a single sentence about why it holds “home” for you.
Because in the end, that’s what I’m doing too, over oceans, across cities, in borrowed light. Making small proofs. Leaving myself a trail back. Not to a house. To a feeling.