After the Idea of Leaving is a long-form documentary photography series made between 2017 and 2025, primarily in Barcelona, with images from Valencia. It traces the years that follow an invisible rupture, the moment when leaving became thinkable, when a city stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like a question.
In 2018, after months of uncertainty and the absence of paid work, I almost packed my life and returned to India. Nothing dramatic happened in the streets to mark that moment. The city remained itself. But internally, something shifted. Staying was no longer passive. It became an act with weight.
This project began after that shift. It is not about departure, but about what came after the decision to not go. The photographs move through public life and private intervals: bodies at a distance, faces in passing, architecture that holds memory without acknowledging it, light that arrives on schedule regardless of outcome. The work resists spectacle and chooses attention instead, following the slow formation of belonging through repetition, through failure and persistence, through the quiet accumulation of days.
Over time, Barcelona turned from a backdrop into a lived geography. The series became a way to register change without announcing it, a record of endurance and of learning the city’s rhythms, of finding meaning in ordinary scenes that would otherwise disappear. The camera functions less as a tool for explanation and more as a way of staying present, returning again and again until the environment stopped being exterior.
After the Idea of Leaving is ultimately a portrait of becoming. Not of becoming someone else, but of becoming attached. It documents a life that stayed, and a city that slowly began to return that permanence.
Further reflections on staying and long-term observation can be found in an accompanying essay.