After the Idea of Leaving

There is a moment that does not announce itself, when leaving becomes imaginable. It is not a crisis, not an argument, not a single failure. It arrives quietly, after repetition has worn something thin. A city does not reject you outright. It simply stops responding in the way you expected. What once felt provisional begins to feel unresolved.

In 2018, after months without work, I reached that moment in Barcelona. The idea of leaving entered my life not as a plan, but as a question. It did not come with certainty or drama. It came with fatigue. With the realisation that staying required more intention than I had previously admitted. Remaining was no longer passive. It became a decision with weight.

Nothing in the city marked this shift. Daily routines continued uninterrupted. Streets followed their familiar rhythms. Light returned to the same surfaces each morning. The rupture existed internally, but it changed how I moved through time and place.

This work begins after that shift. It is not about departure, nor about nostalgia for a life that might have unfolded elsewhere. It is concerned with what follows the decision not to go. Made over several years, the work developed slowly, without urgency, shaped by duration rather than events.

The process relied on repetition. On returning to the same spaces without expectation. On allowing familiarity to accumulate without forcing meaning. Over time, attention replaced intention. What emerged was not a portrait of a city, but a record of sustained presence within it.

Staying revealed itself as an ongoing act rather than a resolution. Growth was not announced. It appeared indirectly, through endurance, through learning the city’s pace, through recognising significance in moments that offered no immediate reward. The act of photographing became less about searching and more about remaining attentive.

After the Idea of Leaving reflects a period in which attachment formed quietly. Not through arrival or belonging by declaration, but through persistence. It documents a life that stayed, and a place that gradually ceased to feel exterior. What remains is not an answer to the question of leaving, but the trace of having lived alongside it.

This essay accompanies the long-term documentary photography project After the Idea of Leaving.