moush sara john

The bustle of the city blurred past me as I weaved through crowds, milling pedestrians, and media carrying some of their best gear. Last year on Remembrance Day I was on assignment too, the only difference being I had to cover the ceremony in Toronto, and that made all the difference.

Later this week I will be completing five months in Stettler, but not one day goes by without me being grateful to be part of a community that truly appreciates what I do. Today while I was covering the Remembrance Day ceremony at the Performing Arts Centre here, I had quite a few people come up to me and say that they admire my work, the way I photograph, the way I had taken a particular picture . . . strangers – people I hadn’t met before, people I have met perhaps a few times, people whose names I still have to process.

Each of these interactions reflect only a fraction of my reality, yet the unfaltering rhythm of life here – the runner who pounds the concrete at 5 am; the workers who begin putting up road closure signs a little later and the school bus that goes past my house – could almost make it seem as though home isn’t too far.

In this world of taking, talking and tackling big issues, the smaller ones get left out. My reason to come to Stettler, a town of approximately 6,000 people from Toronto’s six million, was to capture the burden of these unheard voices. This has led me to a few interesting situations and places. Those I met have been unfailingly kind, hospitable and warm. And their stories need to be told. This gives me hope.

My three months in this town has been brief, but not easy. It has been made easier though with quite a few people, both at work and outside, and for that I am massively grateful. But my gratitude can’t take away the pain of being so many miles away from home, it can’t bring me any closer to what keeps me from trusting again, and I am accepting that gradually.

Because much of who I am comes from deep guttural sensations of pain and suffering. As artists and photographers, we know how much of the road we need to walk alone, but the caring of things sometimes make up for the loneliness.

Today as I stood in the midst of more than 700 people at the Ol’ MacDonald’s camp grounds as Ian Tyson charmed the crowd, I couldn’t have been more alone and when I looked at Ian Tyson’s face as he sung his last song, I realized he was alone, too.

When I hit Township Rd. 372, I wasn’t really sure I would make it.

By now there have been so many times I have encountered precarious paths leading to my shoot destination that my mind and my heart comforted each other on the journey, with the assurance that if I made it, it would be an opportunity to make great pictures, and know some people who were passionate about what they do.

The gravel-strewn narrow, grim path had a patch of grass in the middle as far as my eyes could see, almost like horse’s mane, only taller shooting up into the skies. With space for only a single vehicle, sometimes the path meandered through dense greenery waiting to be trimmed, and sometimes through barren, brown fields sweltering in the heat.

It was an agonizing drive, but I reached. And as the road ended it cleared up into vast stretches of green, looking out onto the Ewing Lake.

A small group of riders were engaged in a fervent display of their tie-down skills in an encouraging, friendly environment. This is what I had come to capture.

As I left, through my rearview mirror I saw the path disappearing in the green, now lit up by the rays of the setting sun.

Night descends on this city slowly, grudgingly, in great swathes of mystery, like a city unknown. For eight weeks now Stettler has tried nefariously to lure me into an unspeakable bond of 365 days, but I have held back. 

The past week has seen a lot happen. I've been forced to reflect on my journalistic ethics, have started to shoot a couple of stories close to my heart, snuck into a cobweb-laden abandoned barn and have even been invited into a warm and hospitable home.

But through all this time, through the psychological ups and downs, there's been one question that I've struggled with. And last night, it got answered. I have realized that my journey is different. I think that this had dawned on me a few days back, but I accepted and embraced it completely yesterday.

When I was in France, I'd read on an epitaph that sometimes you can't explain what you see in a person, it is just the way they take you to a place where no one else can. Although I can't remember the author, I remember it was in a cemetery in Lyon, the one on Fourvière hill. Yesterday I unlearned and relearned someone, someone I had a conversation with, someone who I realized is real, perceptive, honest and most importantly, someone who cared.

I need to learn to trust again.

It has been a month since I have come to this part of Canada, flat green land, sometimes just miles of nothing, other times vast expanses of coulees; varied and rugged. I have begun to admire rodeo culture. Here I have met some of the most amazing people in the sport, have begun to understand its nuances, when to press the shutter, where to stand in an indoor arena, where to shoot from in an outdoor rink. Its been a lot of work, hours of standing and shooting in the sun, as the mud and dust lifted off the hooves right into the eye, hours of standing in dimly lit spaces till the eye couldn’t differentiate anymore between good light and bad, but through it all I have had the constant sense of something broken was being replaced, almost revoked, by something more invigorating. And I don’t need to be a certain kind of a shooter, just a strong shooter, an honest photographer in touch with storytelling, be it within one frame or multiple. And though 30 days have just zipped by, I think my time here has just begun. So grateful for all the opportunities I have been given so far, and the amazing support I have received from people, who I can now call friends. 

Someone once asked me when I was a couple of years past twenty, where I would see myself in my thirties. And quite non-chalantly I had shot back, “You’ll see!” So when this same person revisited me last week with an email, I wondered. But by now I was certain that I could not reach her by hopping on a train to Dubai. Well there are no trains from anywhere outside United Arab Emirates to Dubai, to be perfectly honest.

Having a publishing career for more than a decade, and then tweaking my passion ever so slightly to plunge into the aesthetics of photography world is not a slight transition. From a senior editor of the leading publishing house in the Middle East, to a freelance editorial and social documentary photographer in a metropolis like Toronto, trying to get my name out there, is not a slight transition. And especially not that slight when you have travelled over six thousand miles to reset the wiring in your brain to call another land, your home.

In the summer of 2011, as the mercury soared in Dubai (a place that has been my home since 2002), in the clear azure skies of deepest April I saw signs. I took a deep breath and wondered: Yes, the cars here are big and the roads are wide, but I think I need a lot more. It was clear, the water in the cup had dried, and the sunshine on the teaspoon no longer mattered.

I drew the curtain, packed my life into boxes, and travelled 6,890 miles to begin another adventure. Visual journalist. Multimedia creator. Canadian photojournalist. Multimedia storyteller. How will they sound? Where in my resume will they fit? In an unknown place as I contoured the darkness and isolation of my journey, my whole life seemed like a metaphor, as far as I could look back.

Sometimes when the fragments of time take over, and I look around, questions and memories come tumbling down set off by consequences that have been mostly beyond my control.