Sohini Chatterjee
Canada
Bearing Witness, 2021
Digital camera photograph

This image was taken in downtown London, Ontario in 2021 when pandemic-necessitated public health regulations were firmly in place. As a queer femme, dominant caste, racialized, new immigrant to Canada from India, living with complex trauma or CPTSD, this image represents loneliness amidst the simultaneous presence and absence of isolation experienced during the pandemic, when the everyday became a site from which I began to interrogate my locational specificities and embodyminded knowledge. This photograph represents self-making, is emblematic of fleeting connections, and indicates efforts made towards self-actualization. It captures life-altering resources found in loneliness, and reveals the promise of seeing myself in my wholeness before revealing my difference to this new world that I now inhabit.