Sonder: Every Stranger Has a Story (#717)
I don't know her name.
I don't know where she lives.
I don't know whether she has children or grandchildren, whether someone was waiting for her at home that evening, or how many mornings she has carried her fruit to this same place.
I know only where I photographed her.
She was a fruit vendor near the Mukki Gate of Kanha National Park in central India.
And I took her photograph.
She was holding her tray of fruit close to her chest. Mangoes and dates, bright splashes of yellow, orange, red and green. Her face was turned upward. A dark bindi marked her forehead. Her hair was pulled back. Her face carried the lines that come not from a single moment but from years of living.
I pressed the shutter.
A fraction of a second.
And then our lives moved on.
My friend Judy has reminded me that there is a word for what I feel when I look at this photograph now.
Sonder.
A Word for the Stranger
Sonder is the realization that every stranger we encounter is living a life as vivid, complicated and important to them as our own is to us.
It sounds like an old word, but it isn't.
Writer John Koenig coined it in 2021 for The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, his project creating words for familiar human experiences for which our language seems to have forgotten to provide names.
Sonder is particularly powerful because the moment we hear its meaning, many of us recognize the feeling.
For me, this photograph embodies it.
I know almost nothing about this woman.
Yet she had already lived an entire life before I raised my camera.
What Do I Actually Know?
This is one of the dangers - and pleasures - of street photography.
A photograph invites us to invent.
Look at her face.
What is she thinking? Is she tired? Content? Worried? Hopeful?
Who is she looking at? How long has she been selling fruit?
Where will she go when the day's work is finished?
The temptation is to answer those questions from the photograph.
But I can't.
A photograph can show me the wrinkles around her eyes.
It cannot tell me what made her laugh.
It can show me the lines in her forehead.
It cannot tell me what caused her to worry.
It can show me her hands holding a tray of fruit.
It cannot tell me how many children those hands have held, how many meals they have prepared, how much work they have done, or whom they have comforted.
The camera recorded her appearance.
It did not record her life.
Beyond Mukki Gate
Mukki Gate is, for many visitors, a threshold.
We arrive thinking about what lies beyond it:
The forest. Deer. Langurs. Gaur.
Tigers.
There are vehicles to board, guides to meet, cameras to prepare.
We have traveled a long way to see wildlife.
And around the entrance are people whose lives are unfolding while we are preoccupied with what we hope to see inside.
Vendors. Drivers. Guides. Workers. Families.
People can become part of the scenery.
Until one of them doesn't.
For me, this woman didn't.
Perhaps it was the way she held the fruit.
Perhaps it was the upward tilt of her head.
Perhaps it was the extraordinary character written into her face.
Something made me stop.
Something made me look.
And that may be the most important act in street photography.
Not photographing.
Noticing.
She Was Not Waiting for Me
There is another thought that comes with sonder.
This woman's life did not begin when I encountered her.
She had not spent her morning waiting to become the subject of my photograph.
She had her own reason for being there.
She had awakened somewhere that morning. She had dressed. She had obtained or prepared the fruit she hoped to sell. She had travelled to Mukki Gate. She had spoken to people before I arrived and would speak to others after I left.
Perhaps she had been doing this for years.
Perhaps it was her first week.
I don't know.
That is precisely the point.
Her life existed completely independently of mine.
For a few moments our two lives intersected.
Then they separated again.
The Strange Arithmetic of a Photograph
A camera might expose an image for 1/250th of a second.
Suppose the woman in my photograph were sixty years old.
By then she would have lived for nearly two billion seconds.
My photograph captured one tiny fraction of one of them.
Yet here is the strange power of photography:
That fraction survives.
I returned home. She remained in India. Days passed. Then months. Years will pass.
And still, when I open this photograph, there she is.
Holding her fruit. Looking upward. Caught forever in a fraction of a second that was probably completely unremarkable to her.
That realization makes me cautious about saying that a photograph captures a person.
It doesn't.
At best, it captures a moment in the life of a person.
The distinction matters.
The Fruit Is in Color
In this version of the photograph, I left the woman and her surroundings in black and white but allowed the fruit to retain its color.
There is something about that choice that now seems appropriate.
The fruit is the part of her life that I understood.
She was selling it.
Mangoes. Dates. Produce arranged on a tray.
That was visible. That was knowable.
But the woman herself?
She remains, metaphorically as well as photographically, more elusive.
I can study every line in her face and still know almost nothing about her.
The photograph gives me detail without biography.
And perhaps that is exactly what street photography should sometimes do.
Street photography should leave us wondering.
Everyone Is the Main Character
We naturally experience ourselves as the central character in the world.
I remember my childhood. I know the people I have loved. I know my successes and failures, my losses, my embarrassments, my ambitions and regrets.
My memories stretch backward for decades.
Then I encounter a fruit vendor at Mukki Gate.
For a moment she becomes a character in my story.
But sonder asks me to reverse the camera.
From her perspective, I was the stranger.
Perhaps I was simply an older foreign visitor carrying a camera.
Perhaps she noticed me for a moment.
Perhaps she forgot me five seconds later.
I was not an important character in her life.
I was an extra.
And yet I know that I am not an extra in my own life. Neither was she.
Everyone is the main character somewhere.
The Lives Beyond the Frame
That may be what increasingly fascinates me about street photography.
Not simply faces.
Lives.
The people we photograph continue beyond the edges of our pictures.
The child eating a sandwich grows up. The old man in the wheelchair was once a boy. The woman staring through a shop window eventually turns and walks away.
And the fruit vendor at Mukki Gate packs up whatever remains at the end of the day and goes home.
Where? To whom? To what sort of life?
I will probably never know.
Perhaps I don't need to.
Perhaps I don't want to.
Because the value of sonder isn't discovering the stranger's story.
It is recognizing that there is one.
I went to Kanha looking for wildlife.
I photographed many animals.
But among the photographs I brought home was this portrait of a woman whose name I never learned.
For a few seconds, somewhere near the Mukki Gate of Kanha National Park, our lives crossed.
I raised my camera. She looked upward. I pressed the shutter.
And then we both continued with our lives.
Sonder.
She was a stranger to me. But she was never simply a stranger. She was somebody's daughter. Perhaps somebody's mother. Perhaps somebody's grandmother, friend, neighbor or beloved companion.
She had memories I could never see and stories I would never hear.
My photograph captured her face.
It did not capture her life.
And perhaps understanding that is one of the most important lessons a street photographer can learn.
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