The sunset on the Ganga That Changed Everything

I remember it perfectly. It was August 10th, 2019, and I had just finished a one-week silent retreat in India. When I left, I visited a small town nearby called Haridwar, a holy city for Hindus.

It was sunset on the banks of the Ganga River. People had gathered for prayer, performing their ablutions, as they do every evening in that sacred place. The colors, the atmosphere, the energy in the air, it was incredibly powerful and beautiful to my eyes. Even though I had spent a lot of time in India, I had never felt anything quite like it.

At the time, I was only using my phone to take pictures. I had no real connection to photography yet, no training, no equipment, no ambition in that direction. But standing there, watching the light fall on the water and on the faces of the people praying, I felt something very specific: frustration. A deep frustration that I had no way to properly capture the beauty I was witnessing.

I was standing on a bridge above the Ganga River when I told myself, quite simply: it's time to take this seriously.

That was the exact moment. Not a gradual realization, not a slow build-up over months, but one precise instant, standing on that bridge, watching a river carry centuries of faith past me in the dying light. I decided right there to invest in a real camera with the equipment to shoot underwater and begin my journey as a photographer.

Looking back, I find it fitting that the moment my artistic path began was in front of water, not in a studio, not in a gallery, but on the edge of a river people consider holy. Haridwar did not teach me photography. It taught me why I would need it: to hold on to something that words and memory alone could not preserve.

Every image I have made since then, underwater, in silence, on a single breath, carries a trace of that evening on the Ganga.