Shayan Afzal

The year bends to its close, as December tiptoes through its final weeks, cloaked in the quiet inevitability of time’s passage. Once we crest the midpoint of the month, it feels as though its days are already slipping away, like grains of sand, impossible to grasp but deeply felt.

This morning, the stillness was punctuated by the distant echoes of Pink Floyd’s Echoes, a song that, like a familiar stranger, has woven itself back into my life after years of absence. There’s something ineffable in its notes, an undercurrent of longing, almost melancholic, yet alive with a raw, pulsating angst. It stirs the soul in unexpected ways—reminding me of both the vastness of time and the transient nature of the present.

It is fitting, then, that I’ve found myself drawn to my own echoes—the photographs I have captured throughout the year. They sit in quiet folders, unseen for months, yet revisited now with a renewed gaze. And as I pore over them, I sense a reckoning: black and white holds my heart in ways color never quite could.

Color is a world of vivid immediacy, a celebration of what is; but black and white? Black and white is the language of shadows and light, a conversation between absence and presence. It whispers rather than shouts, inviting the viewer to linger, to find meaning in nuance.

Here, Jaffar sits in the light—my steadfast muse. His dark silhouette is a study in contrasts, the curve of his fur against the sharp geometry of the railing behind him. His presence is both anchored and fleeting, a quiet reminder of moments that feel infinite in their simplicity.

As I consider the year ahead, it is this simplicity I wish to pursue—not in the mundane, but in the profound quiet of things unsaid. Black and white photography feels like a return to essentials, where emotions find their voice not in the saturation of hues but in the interplay of shadow and illumination.

December reminds us that endings and beginnings often blur. And as I navigate these closing days, I hold onto the promise that simplicity, like Jaffar in the fleeting winter light, often carries the deepest truths.