Imran Khan sent us a thousand words from his holiday in Greece. They describe a man camouflaged in a pale pink suit and white polo that dissolve into the golden hour’s lavender-tipped amber light washing over the Aegean, the whitewashed walls, even the tablecloths of the repurposed fortification where he stands.
For someone who has spent years making himself visible as PRESS in the world’s darkest corners—to bear witness and document what others couldn’t or wouldn’t see—there’s something profoundly moving in seeing him appear and disappear in a Rorschach of serene beauty instead.
His companion in the image: our Sun, with its widening reflection on the water forming a golden body alongside his. One, ethereal, radiating its warmth with indifference— its golden light falling equally on celebration and carnage. The other, a man of memories painfully seared into his mind by flashes of light that turned flesh to ash.
The cannon beside him creates a perfect visual trick: in one dimension it seems aimed right at his heart, in another it looks past him toward the sea, and in another still it is inert, a relic stripped of all its menace by time and tourism. A fitting metaphor for someone in his line of work—how perspective can transform the same scene from threatening to benign, how what looks dangerous from one angle might actually be safe from another. How all this exists in minds that make a mess of it all.
There he stands with the expression of someone who harbors life’s joys alongside its sorrows. His lips at once a smile and a frown. Hands easy in his pockets, his stance relaxed against that ancient rigid fortification. Meanwhile below, humanity watches another Earthen sunset with the romance that can only exist in compartmentalized minds, but he’s standing there like someone who can see both sides of the coin at the same time.
There is art in standing beside the sun as an equal, invisible not because he’s hiding but because he has harmonized with his setting. After all the burning front-lines, killing grounds and shattered cities, here’s our friend melding into a sunset. May there be many more sunsets like this one, Imran. And happy Father’s Day.
SEÑOR - The Blog 