Georgia, Chapter III — Benches, Phones, and the Exact Moment a City Stops Trying
At first, you photograph the monuments.
After a month, you photograph a woman waiting for the bus with two grocery bags between her knees.
That is how you know the journey is working.
Or that you have definitively run out of major attractions.
The two possibilities, as so often happens in life, can coexist without the slightest problem.
The woman sat beneath a bus shelter.
She was not smiling.
She was not looking at the sea.
She did not appear suffused with the ancient spirit of the Caucasus, did not embody the silent dignity of the Georgian people, and probably had no intention of becoming the protagonist of a meditation on the human condition written by a foreigner with too much time and an expensive lens.
She was waiting for the bus.
The end.
The bags were full.
Her shoulders slightly hunched.
Her gaze fixed on the place where the bus was supposed to appear.
Her entire philosophy at that moment could be summarized as follows:
I hope it gets here soon, because this shit is heavy.
It was the most honest thing I had photographed in days.
Batumi had already done plenty to capture my attention.
Towers.
Statues.
Ferris wheels.
Worn façades.
Cranes thrust toward the sky with the hormonal enthusiasm of an economy newly arrived at puberty.
Old and new had insulted each other inside every frame.
Capital had built balconies.
The past had hung out its underwear.
I had photographed it all.
Then, after enough walking, the landscape had stopped introducing itself.
That is what happens when you stay long enough.
At first, a city is a beautiful woman you meet at a party.
You know only the dress, the light, the way she tilts her glass, and that portion of her personality carefully selected not to ruin the evening.
If you leave early, you can keep imagining her as perfect.
If you stay, sooner or later you watch her search for her keys for twenty minutes while they are in her hand.
You hear her talking to her mother.
Discover that she snores.
That she has a favorite mug.
That she hates Mondays.
That sometimes she eats standing over the sink because she cannot be bothered to dirty a plate.
Seduction ends.
Knowledge begins.
Tourism prefers to leave before then.
It has a flight booked and a very serious relationship with first impressions.
It arrives.
Consumes.
Photographs.
Reviews.
Leaves again.
Then it writes that the city is “surprising,” “authentic,” “full of contrasts,” or “a hidden gem”—a phrase generally applied to places inhabited by hundreds of thousands of people who are perfectly aware they have never been hidden.
I had stayed.
Not long enough to belong to it.
Long enough to bore it.
It was progress.
The city no longer posed every time I went out.
It showed me the commute to work.
People waiting at traffic lights.
Crowded buses.
Occupied benches.
Hands in pockets.
Phones in front of faces.
That mass of unspectacular minutes in which, much to the tourism industry’s annoyance, we spend almost all our lives.
I began photographing people who were waiting.
At bus stops.
Outside stores.
On sidewalks.
At crosswalks.
Sitting inside a car.
Leaning against a wall.
With a bag.
With a cigarette.
Wearing that particular expression of someone who has checked the time three times in the last forty seconds and still believes time can be pressured.
Waiting is one of humanity’s most frequently practiced activities and one of its least celebrated.
No one lists “waiting” among the interests on a résumé.
There are no influencers who specialize in standing still outside a post office.
No businessman takes the stage to explain how he built his empire waiting for the doctor to call his name while leafing through a magazine from 2018.
And yet we wait constantly.
For the bus to arrive.
For the rain to stop.
For an answer.
For a table to open up.
For the money to come in.
For the pain to leave.
For someone to make up their mind.
For someone to change it.
For the light to turn green even though not a car has passed in three minutes and we are civilized enough to obey a lightbulb, but not serene enough to do it without swearing.
Waiting is life’s waiting room.
The décor is awful, and no one knows when their name will be called.
Bus stops were perfect.
Little urban aquariums in which people remained on display with nothing to sell.
A shelter.
A sign.
A bench, if God and the city government happened to agree.
Bodies temporarily gathered by the same inconvenience.
It did not matter who they were.
For a few minutes they shared a direction.
An elderly man sat with his hands resting on a cane.
Beside him, a girl looked at her phone.
A little farther away, a woman held a bag against her side.
No one spoke.
They were together with admirable discipline.
Urban coexistence often amounts to this.
Ignoring one another without hostility.
It is an underrated form of civilization.
We do not have to know everyone.
We do not have to hear every stranger’s story, share our childhoods, mutually acknowledge our traumas, and found a healing community before the number ten arrives.
Sometimes moving your ass six inches so another person can sit down is enough.
Human brotherhood has magnificent ambitions.
Everyday life would settle for an open seat and someone who does not watch videos without headphones.
I photographed a man standing beside the road.
He wore a dark jacket.
His gaze was lost somewhere beyond the cars.
Behind him passed buildings, signs, windows, merchandise, and all the noise required to persuade a city that something was happening.
He remained still.
Perhaps he was waiting.
Perhaps thinking.
Perhaps doing absolutely nothing—an activity now so suspicious that we immediately feel compelled to assign it depth.
A man standing still cannot simply be standing still.
He must be “contemplating.”
He must be “bearing the weight of the years.”
He must be “watching his city change.”
Or perhaps his feet hurt.
Photography loves turning discomfort into destiny.
A serious face becomes melancholy.
A cigarette becomes loneliness.
A window becomes imprisonment.
An old woman on a bench becomes memory.
It is a magnificent profession.
You can meet someone who simply missed the bus and make her look like the final survivor of a defeated century.
I imposed a rule on myself.
I did not know what they were thinking.
I would not pretend that I did.
I could observe posture.
Distance.
Hands.
The way a body occupied space.
Everything else belonged to them.
The problem is that photographers suffer from a professional form of curiosity that, seen from the outside, looks remarkably like bad manners.
We stand on corners.
Watch people.
Wait for something to happen.
If it does, we shoot.
If it does not, we keep watching with the thoughtful expression of someone who claims to be studying the light, when often he is merely waiting for the man in the hat to pass in front of the yellow wall.
Street photography is the elegant name given to loitering when you own equipment expensive enough to suggest artistic intent.
I loitered a great deal.
Seriously.
With discipline.
With several spare batteries.
At first, I looked for the event.
An obvious gesture.
A perfect combination.
Someone running.
Someone arguing.
Light capable of making an ordinary scene exceptional.
Then Batumi taught me repetition.
The same street in the morning.
The same street in the afternoon.
The same bus stop in the rain.
The same stop in the sun.
The same kiosk open.
The same kiosk closed.
The people changed.
The gesture remained.
Arrive.
Stop.
Check.
Wait.
Board.
Disappear.
Every bus was an eraser.
It gathered people from the street and left an empty space in their place, only for other bodies, other bags, other days convinced of their uniqueness to occupy it a few minutes later.
Then another bus arrived.
The city emptied and filled without ever suspending service.
I liked the bus windows.
They reflected buildings, trees, traffic lights, and pieces of sky over the passengers’ faces.
A person looked out while the city literally passed across their face.
Inside was the body.
Outside, movement.
Between them, a surface dirty enough to remind us that poetry, when taking public transportation, should avoid wearing white.
I photographed people behind the windows.
Faces interrupted by reflections.
Hands resting against the glass.
Heads tilted.
Eyes searching for nothing.
A bus offers a rare form of anonymity.
You are visible and irrelevant.
Surrounded and alone.
You can stare into space without anyone staging an intervention.
You can fall asleep, read, watch, worry, replay an argument from three days ago, and finally find the perfect response when it is no longer of any use.
You can imagine changing your life between one stop and the next.
Then you get off near the supermarket and buy detergent.
The revolution can wait.
You are out of dish soap.
Inside a bus, the city stops being architecture.
It becomes the logistics of the body.
Where to brace yourself.
When to stand.
Whom to let through.
How close to get without accidentally starting a relationship.
Which section of rail to grab.
How to keep your balance while the driver treats every application of the brakes as an opportunity to test the passengers’ faith.
It does not matter how elegant the skyline is.
If the driver slams on the brakes, we all become sacks of meat with limited aerodynamic ability.
It is a democratic experience.
For a few seconds, rich, poor, young, old, tourists, and residents share the same political objective:
do not fall on the woman with the eggs.
Cities love to tell their stories through major works.
Bridges.
Towers.
Stadiums.
Squares.
Citizens, on the other hand, judge through small functions.
How long they wait.
How much it costs.
How far away it is.
Whether rain gets inside the shelter.
Whether the bus stops close enough to the curb.
Whether, at seven in the morning, they can get on without mastering hand-to-hand combat.
A city’s future may rise forty stories.
The quality of the day still depends on whether the bus shows up.
It was the perfect continuation of what I had seen in the neighborhoods.
The towers spoke of investment.
The bus stops spoke of time.
Capital measures value in square feet.
Those waiting for a bus measure it in minutes.
Five is acceptable.
Ten produces irritation.
Twenty transforms a moderate citizen into a theorist of insurrection.
Civilization is a very thin layer.
All it takes is for the app to say “two minutes” for seven consecutive minutes, and the beast resurfaces underneath.
Phones were everywhere too.
In hands.
In front of faces.
Between two people sitting side by side.
On tables.
Inside buses.
The small black rectangle had become humanity’s portable chapel.
Everyone knelt with the neck.
Prayed with the thumb.
Waited for a notification.
A reply.
A sign of interest.
A bank confirmation.
A photograph.
A video of someone busy living an apparently better life, recorded and edited so that even they could stop living it for a few minutes.
I was not judging.
I photographed people looking at a screen and immediately checked mine.
Moralism requires consistency.
All I had was a memory card.
The phone solved the waiting.
Or at least covered it.
Once, you simply waited.
You looked at the road.
Other people’s shoes.
The clouds.
An advertisement.
You might even think.
A dangerous activity from which the technology industry has fortunately liberated us.
Now every void can be filled.
Thirty seconds at a traffic light.
Phone.
One minute in an elevator.
Phone.
Someone goes to the bathroom.
Phone.
The conversation reaches a moment of silence.
Phone.
We have become incapable of being alone even in the company of the person we chose so that we would not be alone.
I photographed two people sitting on the same bench.
Each was looking at a separate screen.
They were close.
Perhaps lovers.
Perhaps friends.
Perhaps strangers brought together by a shortage of seating.
The photograph did not say.
It showed two bodies and two elsewheres.
It made me laugh.
We spent millennia building cities capable of gathering millions of people in the same place.
Then we invented an object that allows each of them to be somewhere else.
It is a remarkable achievement.
Loneliness finally has global coverage.
But it was easy to become moralistic here too.
A phone does not only separate.
It connects.
A woman sitting at the bus stop could be speaking to a son far away.
A young man could be looking for work.
Someone could check a route, translate a sentence, send money, read the news, or tell another person they would be late because of a bus evidently operating on a geological calendar.
Objects are not guilty of our obsessions.
They are very willing accomplices.
A phone can contain a family.
It can also contain forty-seven videos of men explaining how to build discipline by waking at 4:20 a.m., usually recorded by someone whose job consists of convincing everyone else to wake at 4:20 a.m.
Freedom of use comes with questionable consequences.
I kept walking.
I saw people leaning against cars.
Men sitting outside a store.
A woman standing beneath a sign.
Young people gathered around something I could not make out from a distance.
People crossing.
People returning.
People who seemed to have gone nowhere and still wore the exhausted air of someone who had completed a diplomatic mission.
Everyday life is not photogenic by nature.
You have to give it time.
At first, a person standing still looks insignificant.
Then you notice the distances.
One man leaves a foot and a half between himself and everyone else.
A couple touches without looking at each other.
A woman holds a grocery bag on her knees as though it contains something fragile.
A young man takes up the entire bench with the elastic arrogance of young bodies, convinced that their joints and the world will remain forever at their disposal.
An old man folds his newspaper.
A little girl swings her legs because adults’ time moves at an unbearable pace.
Nothing happens.
Everything reveals itself.
Waiting strips people of the action through which they normally present themselves.
They are not working.
They are not buying.
They are not going anywhere, at least for the moment.
They are bodies temporarily without a function.
And that is where they become interesting.
Society prefers us in motion.
Producing.
Consuming.
Moving.
Delivering.
Arriving.
Every minute should belong to something.
Even free time must become an activity.
Run.
Travel.
Train.
Visit.
Learn.
Improve yourself.
Resting is no longer enough.
You have to practice high-performance recovery, preferably tracking your sleep with a device that informs you in the morning, with scientific precision, how poorly you managed even to lose consciousness.
The person waiting for the bus interrupts it all.
Not as an act of rebellion.
Because the bus has not arrived yet.
It is an imposed pause.
A small, involuntary strike by the body.
The market hates time that produces nothing.
That is why it has filled bus stops with advertisements.
If you absolutely must stand still, at least desire something.
A perfume.
An apartment.
A car.
Younger skin.
A vacation you need to recover from the work you did to pay for the vacation.
They never leave us alone with our inadequacy.
They offer us a new one, printed large enough to be read from the other side of the street.
The benches, however, resisted.
A bench is a radical object.
It demands nothing.
You do not have to order.
You do not need a reservation.
You do not have to prove you belong to the category of people for whom the furnishings were chosen.
You sit down.
Naturally, some cities have already solved the problem by installing dividers, sloped surfaces, and structures designed to prevent a human being from lying down, because our idea of decorum often consists of making suffering less visible without committing the economically dangerous mistake of reducing it.
But an ordinary bench remains a concession.
It says:
You may stop here even if you buy nothing.
That is an increasingly rare sentence.
In Batumi, benches gathered the old, the young, couples, solitary people, bags, umbrellas, and that particular kind of weariness that requires no diagnosis.
Someone talked.
Someone smoked.
Someone watched the world pass.
Older people often have a better relationship with benches.
They do not seem to experience them as an interruption.
They inhabit them.
Young people sit waiting to leave again.
Older people seem to know that sitting can already constitute a complete agenda.
They watch.
Comment.
Recognize.
The neighborhood passes before them while they perform the delicate task of establishing who has gained weight, who no longer says hello, which store has changed hands, and which young man is decidedly too old to keep dressing that way.
Every community needs an archive.
Before databases, there were people sitting outside.
They knew everything.
They stored the data without passwords and shared it in violation of every privacy regulation.
I passed with my camera.
At first, some of them looked at me.
Then fewer and fewer did.
Not because I had become invisible.
I had become repetitive.
Cities digest strangers through habit.
On the first day, you are a presence.
On the fifth, a curiosity.
On the tenth, the guy with the camera.
After a month, you are the asshole walking past again.
It was the closest I had come to integration without properly learning the language.
I began recognizing people I did not know.
The man who often sat in the same place.
The woman who crossed at a brisk pace.
The man leaning near an entrance.
The boys outside a store.
We had no names.
We did not always greet one another.
But their presence had ceased to be accidental.
They were part of the map.
Perhaps belonging to a city begins this way.
Not when you know its monuments.
When you recognize the extras.
When you know that face should be there and would notice its absence.
Tourism collects places.
Familiarity collects recurrences.
You know where to buy water.
Which sidewalk floods.
Which direction the bus will come from.
Which door looks like the entrance but never opens.
Which cashier does not need you to finish the sentence because she already knows what you are looking for—and probably knew yesterday too, while you kept gesturing like a mime struck by a neurological disorder.
A place begins to belong to you when it stops entertaining you.
When you can cross it without demanding that it surprise you.
When an ordinary day is not recorded as a failure of the journey.
That was the difficult part.
I had come to take photographs.
Every morning, I went out believing something had to happen.
A good image.
A scene.
Some minimal reward for having walked miles carrying enough equipment to cause permanent damage to my right shoulder.
The city had not signed that contract.
On some days, nothing happened.
The light was mediocre.
People moved at the wrong moment.
Buses blocked the subject.
The subject blocked the bus.
A white car invariably appeared in the exact spot where it would ruin the composition, proving that while the universe may not be organized around us, it nevertheless has a department devoted to minor hostilities.
I came home with ordinary photographs.
They irritated me.
Then I looked at them again.
A week later.
A month later.
The ordinary had begun to change in value.
Not because the pictures had become technically better overnight.
Because memory had begun to work.
I recognized the noise.
The temperature.
The route.
What had happened before and afterward.
A photograph does not preserve only what it shows.
It preserves everything the photographer remembers and the viewer can never know.
It is a terribly unfair property.
To me, that woman was not merely a woman at a bus stop.
She was the road I had traveled every morning.
The store behind her.
The rain that had stopped shortly before.
The sound of the bus arriving two minutes later.
For anyone looking, there remained a face and two bags.
The photographer always owns a secret part of the image.
The photograph belongs to everyone.
The memory remains selfishly his.
Perhaps that was precisely why I kept taking pictures.
Not to capture the world—a phrase that makes the photographer sound like some kind of colonial hunter armed with sensitivity.
To leave triggers for myself.
A face.
A window.
A bench.
Something that, years later, might reopen an apparently insignificant day and return to me the man I was while passing through it.
That desire was selfish too.
Photography is selfish.
It wants to preserve what time has no intention of letting us keep.
It is a protest.
Elegant.
Expensive.
Destined to lose.
But no less fascinating for it.
I kept photographing people as they waited because waiting contained a simple truth.
Most of life does not happen at decisive moments.
It happens between them.
While you are on your way back.
While you wait.
While you buy something.
While you look at your phone.
While you sit for five minutes because you arrived too early.
Great photographs often seek the climax.
Life, the administrative bastard, mostly files dead time.
We think we remember journeys for their wonders.
Then, years later, a bus stop returns.
The color of a jacket.
A hand against a window.
The shape of a bag.
The way light fell on a sidewalk no guidebook had considered worthy of a paragraph.
Memory possesses no critical judgment.
It keeps bullshit.
Loses birthdays.
Forgets important names.
Then, at three in the morning, returns with offensive precision an ad seen on a bus in 2011.
Perhaps photographing meant collaborating with that defect.
Providing it with evidence.
Toward the end of the month, I almost completely stopped asking where the interesting things were.
I went out.
Walked.
Returned to the same places.
Repetition, which at first I had mistaken for a poverty of possibilities, became depth.
To see a street once is to recognize its shape.
To see it thirty times is to recognize its moods.
You know when it is empty.
When it fills.
Which light crosses the buildings.
Who opens first.
Who stays out later.
A place does not reveal itself because you pass through it.
It reveals itself because you return.
An irritating piece of news for anyone who has built an identity around leaving.
I was good at arriving.
The new made me attentive.
Every detail seemed significant.
Staying required a different quality.
Continuing to look after the novelty was gone.
It is easy to desire someone at the first meeting.
It is easy to love a city at sunset.
It is easy to feel alive when everything is different.
The difficult part arrives on Tuesday morning.
It is raining.
You slept badly.
The street is the same.
The person beside you has already told that story.
The bartender no longer finds you mysterious.
Now he merely knows that you always order the same thing and leave crumbs on the table.
Familiarity is the end of the character.
What remains is behavior.
Batumi no longer had to seduce me.
I no longer had to conquer it through photographs.
We could simply put up with each other.
It was almost intimacy.
One morning, I saw a man sitting alone.
The road passed in front of him.
Behind him was the city, busy with its minor business.
Nothing remarkable was happening.
I took the picture.
Not because he was sad.
Not because the solitude of modern man inside the post-Soviet metropolis urgently required my contribution.
I took it because the scene was there.
Complete without being important.
A man.
A seat.
A little space.
The right not to represent anything.
It seemed like an achievement.
I had spent years looking for meanings large enough to justify the images.
Perhaps an image could also confine itself to saying:
this Tuesday, at this hour, a person was sitting here.
It did not change the world.
The world already had an unbearable number of people claiming they wanted to change it and very few willing to pick up the glasses after the meeting.
A photograph could bear witness without delivering a verdict.
Look without turning everything into a lesson.
It was harder than it sounds.
The author’s ego wants to add value.
If ordinary life is already enough, what the fuck are we here for?
So we interpret.
Explain.
Construct symbols.
A bench becomes time.
A bus becomes destiny.
A woman with groceries becomes everyday resilience.
And sometimes it works.
Other times, the woman would simply like to get home before the chicken thaws.
Honesty also means allowing people to remain opaque.
Not understanding does not mean not seeing.
Cities are full of lives that will pass beside us without opening.
We can respect them all the same.
Toward the end of the afternoon, the bus stops changed.
More bodies.
More exhaustion.
People left work and arranged themselves along the sidewalks as though the city were slowly returning what it had swallowed that morning.
Someone carried bags.
Someone flowers.
Someone bread.
Someone only the face left after a day spent being polite to people who did not deserve it.
It was the most human hour.
Productivity had ended its shift.
Needs remained.
To return.
To eat.
To take off your shoes.
To call.
To buy something along the way.
The money earned during the day began turning into concrete things.
Vegetables.
Cigarettes.
Medicine.
Sweets.
A bottle.
A bouquet bought out of love, guilt, or that diplomatic zone in which the two emotions become indistinguishable.
The real estate market could wait.
People had to eat dinner.
A bus arrived.
It braked in front of the stop.
The doors opened with the weary sigh of someone forced to begin the same conversation again.
People boarded.
The woman lifted her bags.
For a moment, her face changed.
Not happiness.
Not spiritual relief.
The simple recognition that the wait was over.
Then she disappeared inside the bus.
The shelter remained empty.
I looked at the photograph.
A month earlier, I probably would have looked for a tower behind her.
A contrast.
Proof of urban transformation.
Something capable of communicating immediately:
Look, I am in Batumi and I have identified the theme.
Now I did not need it.
The city was no longer required to appear as a backdrop.
It was already all there.
In the weight of the bags.
In the time lost.
In the bus finally arriving.
In the disorderly line.
In the gesture with which one stranger let another pass.
In the faces behind the glass.
Batumi was not only what rose upward.
It was what returned every day.
The same stop.
The same route.
The same small obligations.
A city does not become familiar once you have seen everything.
It becomes familiar when you can see the same thing again and not consider it time wasted.
I did not belong to Batumi.
Thirty days, a few hundred photographs, and a questionable knowledge of bus schedules are not enough to obtain emotional citizenship.
It would be a very convenient system, especially for photographers inclined toward self-congratulation.
But I was no longer merely passing through.
Passing through is in a hurry.
I had begun repeating myself.
I knew certain waits.
Certain turns.
Certain faces.
The city had not adopted me.
It had simply stopped changing its clothes when it saw me coming.
That was enough.
The bus set off again.
Behind the window, the woman arranged the bags at her feet.
One contained something red.
Tomatoes, perhaps.
Or strawberries.
Something destined to ripen, bruise, and rot long before the towers built along the waterfront.
Concrete could afford to wait.
Dinner could not.
I followed the bus with my eyes for a few yards.
Then turned toward the market.