“There is a violence in the language of capturing photographs which mimics the constant violence of surveillance in the rupture of ideological obedience asked from the world by the world.”

Ayesha Raees عائشہ‭ ‬رئیس‭ ‬ identifies herself as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her work strongly revolves around issues of race and identity, G/god and displacement, and mental illness while possessing a strong agency for accessibility, community, and change. Ayesha is a Poetry Editor at AAWW’s The Margins and has received fellowships from Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Brooklyn Poets, and Kundiman. Her debut chapbook Coining A Wishing Tower (2022) won the Broken River Prize. From Lahore, Pakistan, she currently shifts between Lahore and New York City.

from A MOUTH HOLDS MANY THINGS: Cycle

Artist Reflection

If we could hold our eyes in our hands and observe where the gaze lands, the camera will come into reckoning. The moment it is lifted, the body holds in the breath and waits until the subject falls towards the perfect posture, sometimes against or towards an external power (light! action! object!). The finger then presses the button, a trigger, and shoots. There is a violence in the language of capturing photographs which mimics the constant violence of surveillance in the rupture of ideological obedience asked from the world by the world. In this case, in New York City, the landscape is a making of human bodies finding home in both repulsion and attraction in other human bodies. In the homogeneity of crowds, there is both visibility and invisibility.

I can cry on the pavement. You can die on the pavement. There is a man in a suit. There is a man with a revolver. All these images I witnessed were found inside me through the body of the camera I lifted and shot through.

I talk about the nature of photography because it gave me both wings and shield. I had an excuse to stand still and stare, be astounded from the movement of interaction and isolation in front of me all in the name of observation, and find in it all solace, knowledge, care, and ultimately—poetry.

When I look back at these photographs, some digital, some analogue, I find in them a vastness of an unsaid experience. The photographs have gone through a test of time. Afterall, I had captured them in early 2021, during the pandemic, and edited and printed them a year after. From a moment of observation to holding it as an object in my hand, there was a weight asking for mass.

A language asking for comprehension.

In this asking, I found myself in the realm of hybridization. To create a partial space where two mediums collide in great asking for they are unable to breathe in just one.

These photographs, with poetry, both in Urdu or English, hold that asking: where does your gaze land? What occurs in a realm of comprehension? Unreadability? And how much did you pause, breath held, in your own kind of askings?