Georgia, Chapter I — The City That Wanted to Be Seen
Batumi welcomed me with a question.
Not “welcome.”
Not “how was the trip?”
Not “do you need anything?”
It had not yet had time to get to know me and therefore, with admirable efficiency, did not pretend to care about my health, my expectations, or the delicate emotional balance with which I had made it all the way to the Georgian coast.
It had a single word.
Enormous.
Written in front of the sea.
*WHERE.*
Where.
No question mark.
It did not need one.
It was threatening enough already.
I stopped to photograph it.
A city that asks where you are while you are standing precisely inside it possesses either a remarkable sense of humor or identity issues serious enough to require professional help.
Batumi seemed to possess both.
From the overlook, I could see it stretched between the Black Sea and the mountains.
The coast drew a clean line.
Buildings occupied the available ground and began to rise, as though horizontal space had run out and someone had decided to proceed directly toward God, trusting that apartments with a view would be available in Heaven too.
Skyscrapers.
Towers.
Roads.
Construction sites.
A Ferris wheel.
Hotels.
Cylindrical buildings.
Curved buildings.
Buildings that looked as though they had been designed during a meeting in which the only forbidden question was:
“Are we sure about this?”
Batumi was not a shy city.
It had no intention of sitting quietly in the back of the class, hoping someone would notice the depth of its character.
It had walked in wearing heels and sequins, three drinks down, with a crane tucked into its hair.
Look at me.
That was the message.
Look at me now.
Look at me while I change.
Look at me before I decide to become something else again.
I had planned to stay for a month.
A month is long enough to get past the first impression and short enough to keep believing that whatever you have understood might have some value.
During the first few days, I photographed everything Batumi had prepared to be photographed.
It was inevitable.
Seductive cities work that way.
They do not immediately show you the bills, the leaking pipes, the racist aunt, or the closet where they have hidden every architectural decision made during a midlife crisis.
First they take you to the waterfront.
Show you their best side.
Arch their back.
Hold their breath.
And you, the photographer, a weak and predictable human being in the presence of beautiful light, do exactly what they want.
You shoot.
The sea ran along the city’s edge.
On one side were stones, waves, and distant ships.
On the other, palms, glass, metal, and towers trying to reflect themselves in any surface polite enough to cooperate.
People passed between them.
Tiny.
Temporary.
The landscape seemed designed to remind them that the city would remain longer.
It was a rather optimistic declaration.
Cities believe they are immortal because buildings outlive the mayors who inaugurate them.
Then come an earthquake, a war, a real estate fund with good political connections, or simply a generation with different taste, and all that certainty ends up inside a rendering titled *New Luxury Concept*.
Cities do not always die.
Sometimes they are renovated beyond recognition.
Batumi knew the process well.
Beginning in 2008, its architecture became an explicit part of its tourism strategy. It was not merely buildings that were being constructed. It was an image.
The city no longer sought merely to house people.
It wanted to enter their photographs.
It is a very contemporary ambition.
Once, a city needed a port, a fortress, a market, drinking water, and preferably walls sturdy enough to keep the neighbors from arriving uninvited.
Now it needs a visual identity.
A logo.
An Instagrammable promenade.
A structure absurd enough to make visitors say:
“I absolutely have to photograph that.”
They do not need to know what the fuck it is.
What matters is that they photograph it.
Batumi had understood the rule.
A black-and-white tower rose beside the sea like a gigantic paper cup designed by an architect with a particular hostility toward straight lines.
Nearby, one building seemed to lean beneath the weight of its balconies.
Another had a rippling façade.
Another still narrowed, widened, and began again, as though the design had been approved during five different states of consciousness.
The surprising thing was that, together, they worked.
Not in the traditional sense of the word.
They were not harmonious.
They did not form a delicate whole.
They did not produce that reassuring feeling with which some European cities inform you that every stone has stood exactly where it belongs since 1743, and that any attempt to move one will require seventeen permits, a municipal referendum, and the intervention of an association chaired by a man named Gianfranco.
Batumi worked the way a party that had gone wonderfully wrong works.
Too many people.
Music too loud.
Someone dancing on a table.
A man in an elegant jacket arguing heatedly with a streetlight.
No one quite knows who invited the guy with the snake.
And yet you do not want to leave.
I kept looking up.
The shapes changed.
Glass.
Steel.
Concrete.
Curves.
Edges.
Façades glossy enough to reflect the future before it had even arrived.
Architecture is always a declaration of power, even when it pretends to be merely a practical place in which to arrange beds, offices, and people convinced that an apartment on the twenty-seventh floor might finally keep their existence from looking ordinary.
To build high is to say:
We can afford it.
We have arrived.
Look how small the people who did not make it seem from up here.
Buildings do not speak the sentences aloud.
That is one of concrete’s advantages.
It can be arrogant without damaging its reputation.
But Batumi did not strike me as merely arrogant.
There was something more vulnerable in its display.
The city was auditioning.
It had put on too much makeup because it feared the camera would not catch its features.
It had learned its lines.
Rehearsed its poses.
Positioned the sea behind it, because even a city knows the horizon helps it look profound.
It waited for tourists, investors, buyers, gamblers, hoteliers, and anyone else with enough money to mistake an opportunity for a promise.
It wanted the part.
I did not yet know which film.
Perhaps the one about the Black Sea’s new miracle.
Perhaps a comedy about capitalism starring real estate developers with very white teeth.
Perhaps a drama in which, during the third act, someone discovers that people were already living beneath the renderings.
But that did not matter in the first chapter.
We were still at the audition.
And Batumi had prepared.
On the waterfront, I found that word again.
*WHERE.*
Seen up close, it was even more absurd.
The letters were enormous, dark, planted before the water.
Where.
Where are you?
Where are you going?
Where did you park?
Where will all these buildings end once the final inch of coastline has been transformed into an investment with a shared pool?
Or, more simply:
Where do you want it to look as though you are when you post this photograph?
Tourist cities stopped being simple places long ago.
They are backdrops for identity.
You do not merely go to Paris.
You temporarily become someone who has been to Paris.
You do not merely drink coffee in Rome.
You photograph a cup against a Roman street so that someone—preferably trapped in the office during a meeting—can feel a small, healthy dose of envy.
You do not pass through Batumi.
You use Batumi to tell a more interesting version of yourself.
I was no different.
I had brought a camera.
Several lenses.
Batteries.
Memory cards.
Everything required to prove that I had looked.
The ordinary tourist returns with a magnet.
The photographer returns with thousands of files and the slightly more presumptuous conviction that his souvenir constitutes testimony.
We are all thieves.
Some of us own better equipment.
A little farther on, the Ferris wheel appeared.
A perfectly human construction.
You pay.
Climb aboard.
Make one complete revolution.
Return to the exact point where you began.
Then step off satisfied because, for a few minutes, you looked down on the same life you now have to reenter.
A metaphor for adult existence so precise it is almost offensive.
At least the Ferris wheel is honest.
It does not promise a destination.
It promises a perspective.
Perhaps we should frame relationships the same way.
No “forever.”
No “you are the person I was waiting for.”
Only:
“Would you like to get on? It will last about ten minutes, we may be afraid, and in the end we will find ourselves exactly where we were before—but at least we will have seen the sea.”
There was a lighthouse near the wheel.
White.
Solid.
Almost restrained.
It looked like the only adult left at a party for rich teenagers.
It was there to give ships a direction while everything around it seemed designed to pleasantly confuse those walking on land.
The lighthouse had a job.
The wheel produced entertainment.
The towers sold desire.
Each played its part.
Then I met Ali and Nino.
Twenty-six feet of steel.
Two bodies constructed from layers of metal.
A man.
A woman.
Every evening they draw closer, enter each other, pass through each other, and separate.
Then begin again.
One of the most honest representations of love humanity has managed to build without the use of a divorce lawyer.
The two figures derive from the protagonists of the novel of the same name attributed to Kurban Said. In Batumi, they did not merely stand motionless on a pedestal, pretending love was a position attained once and for all.
They moved.
Sought each other.
Joined.
Lost each other.
Repeated the cycle.
They had a schedule, an engine, and maintenance.
They were already better organized than most couples I had known.
I photographed them apart.
Then close.
Then nearly overlapping.
The Ferris wheel behind them added another circle to the scene, because apparently Batumi wanted to be very clear that day about the cyclical nature of our sentimental bullshit.
Looking at the photographs, most people would probably have chosen the one in which the two figures appeared united.
That is what we do.
We preserve the moment of fusion.
The kiss.
The embrace.
The promise.
The photograph in which we seem finally to have arrived.
We leave out the next frame.
The one in which the bodies continue moving, pass through one another, and discover that loving each other has not turned them into the same person.
Separation ruins the romance.
And yet it is necessary.
Two people cannot remain fused without one of them eventually calling the police.
Ali and Nino joined without ceasing to pass through one another.
The mechanism did not promise they would remain together.
It promised they would keep returning.
That was not nothing.
Especially considering they did it without long voice messages sent at two in the morning, creative interpretations of read receipts, or sudden declarations about the need to “work on themselves.”
The sky behind them was clear.
The steel reflected the light.
Tourists approached.
Took photographs.
Waited for the exact moment.
Even love now has an optimal posting time.
Batumi was not content merely to offer a romantic sculpture.
Nearby I found more silhouettes.
A man.
A woman.
A red heart suspended between them.
They had been reduced to essential lines, as though someone had compressed the entire sentimental affair into an icon simple enough to understand even after three cocktails.
Him.
Her.
The heart.
No disapproving families.
No different religions.
No fear of abandonment.
No exes who happen to appear precisely when things begin to work.
No children, distance, jobs, trauma, silences, or Sundays spent arguing over who should empty the dishwasher.
Graphic design has this extraordinary advantage over life.
It can remove every painful part.
A red heart remains.
Perfect.
Photographable.
Free of side effects.
A little farther on, I found the word *liberté*.
Written in cursive.
In front of the sea.
Batumi had arranged its waterfront like a supermarket of humanity’s grand aspirations.
Love over there.
Freedom a little farther on.
God near the beach.
A tower devoted to national identity.
Popcorn in the middle.
It was a complete system.
You could fall in love, set yourself free, pray, remember who you were, and buy something to eat without straying too far from the parking lot.
The word *liberté* made me smile.
Does freedom need to be pointed out?
Evidently it does.
Without a sign, we might pass straight through it without recognizing it.
It happens to us constantly.
We have time and say we are bored.
We have a choice and call it confusion.
We are free to leave and remain because at least we know where the furniture is.
Then we stand before a word written by the sea, photograph it, and suddenly feel close to something immense.
Such is the power of decorative lettering.
It makes accessible what, in real life, normally requires money, courage, valid documents, and a considerable number of people willing to leave you the fuck alone.
Beside it was a small popcorn machine.
Red.
Solitary.
Perfect.
It looked like a chapel dedicated to the god of snacks.
It reassured me.
Batumi could talk about love, freedom, identity, and destiny all it liked, but it had not forgotten the fundamental truth:
sooner or later, someone will be hungry.
Every great spiritual experience has a concession stand.
Pilgrimages have inns.
Temples sell souvenirs.
Museums have cafés where a bottle of water costs enough to finance a small regional conflict.
Even enlightenment, if it lasts longer than forty-five minutes, should include something to snack on.
I continued along the coast.
Ships appeared in the distance.
Small silhouettes motionless on the horizon.
They did not participate in the spectacle.
They did not need statues, hearts, or observation towers.
They carried something.
Goods.
Fuel.
Metal.
Objects destined to become money elsewhere.
The port was the city’s least photogenic and most concrete part.
Batumi existed on the sea long before anyone decided to turn its shoreline into a vertical résumé.
The ships were a reminder.
A port city can put on all the glass it wants.
Beneath the makeup remains a place built for arriving and departing.
Perhaps that was why Batumi seemed perpetually in motion even when its buildings stood still.
It had the psychology of a waiting room.
People arriving.
People leaving.
Money passing through.
Different languages.
Promises spoken by someone who already has a return ticket.
The sea did not merely connect the city to the rest of the world.
It kept the city from feeling complete.
Across the water, something else always existed.
Another coast.
Another market.
Another opportunity.
The desire to become international often grows from the fear of looking provincial.
Being a place is not enough.
You want to be a destination.
Being known is not enough.
You want to be recognizable.
The distinction is fundamental.
You come to know a person over time.
You recognize a brand in half a second.
Batumi was working on the second option.
The Alphabet Tower rose above Miracle Park.
Four hundred twenty-seven feet.
Thirty-three Georgian letters arranged along a structure evoking the double helix of DNA.
Language and identity fused into biology.
The alphabet in the blood.
The nation transformed into architecture.
At the top were an observation deck and a revolving restaurant, because even the most profound identity sells better with a good view and someone bringing the check.
The tower was completed in 2011.
It was imposing, strange, and slightly out of proportion to everything around it.
In other words, it was perfect for Batumi.
I photographed the sphere at the top.
The letters.
The metal structure against the sky.
I thought about the Georgian alphabet.
Curves.
Signs.
A script that, to my eyes, seemed designed by someone who had decided to eliminate corners almost entirely because life already contained enough of them.
I could not read it.
It was everywhere.
On signs.
Buildings.
Buses.
Packages.
To me, they were shapes.
To the people who lived there, they were orders, names, prices, directions, promises, and administrative threats.
This is one of travel’s strangest effects.
Other people’s everyday lives become decoration.
A sign that might say “emergency exit” is, to you, merely a charming example of local calligraphy.
Ignorance possesses remarkable aesthetic sensitivity.
The Alphabet Tower tried to keep you from forgetting that those forms were not ornamental.
They were a language.
A history.
A 427-foot declaration of belonging.
A rather elegant way of saying:
“We are who we are. In case that was not clear, we built a fucking tower.”
I respected that.
We Westerners had turned identity into a field in the profile settings.
Nationality.
Profession.
Pronouns.
Relationship status.
Orientation.
Interests.
Skills.
Zodiac signs.
Five carefully selected photographs and a description in which we desperately try to sound spontaneous.
Batumi had chosen metal.
At least it did not pretend to be modest.
But a city can shout who it is precisely while becoming something else.
That was what intrigued me.
The tower declared an ancient identity through new architecture.
National DNA wound around a structure built to attract international visitors.
Tradition served the future.
The future sold tradition.
It was not necessarily a contradiction.
It was a marriage.
Like every marriage, it required compromise, money, and the ability to smile while someone took pictures.
I continued collecting shapes.
The Ferris wheel entered and left the images.
Once behind Ali and Nino.
Another time above the buildings.
Then isolated in the sky.
The colored cabins remained suspended.
Red.
Yellow.
Blue.
Small boxes charged with lifting human bodies high enough to let them forget, for a few minutes, the true dimensions of their problems.
From above, problems always look smaller.
Not because they are.
Because you can no longer make out the people living them.
Even traffic looks harmonious from an observation deck.
Cars become dots.
People become figures.
Windows become repeating modules.
Height is power’s favorite aesthetic filter.
It erases the details.
And without details, almost anything can look orderly.
I photographed several colorful façades.
Vertical lines.
Yellow.
Green.
Red.
Blue.
They looked like a filter installed directly over the city so no one would have to waste time correcting the images later.
Batumi already had contrast, saturation, and questionable highlight management.
All it lacked was the “export” button.
Buildings appeared behind the trees.
Reflected in the water.
Emerging among branches and palms, they looked like creatures that had grown too quickly, artificial organisms the ground had not yet learned to accept.
One was shaped like a blade.
Another like a sail.
Another still looked like an enormous luxury appliance whose purpose no one had managed to determine.
I did not find them beautiful in the traditional sense.
They amused me.
I was drawn to their insolence.
Elegance is often merely the good taste of someone afraid of being remembered for the wrong reason.
Batumi did not seem to possess that fear.
It preferred to risk looking ridiculous.
That quality is rarer than it seems.
People say they want to be original.
Then they wear the same clothes, furnish identical homes, use the same words, photograph the same cappuccino, and choose opinions just transgressive enough to be shared already by a few million strangers.
We want to stand out without risking being alone.
To be daring with a return policy.
Not Batumi.
It built a cylindrical building beside a neoclassical tower, a Ferris wheel in front of a lighthouse, and a metal double helix near two lovers who passed through each other.
You might like it.
You might think it was hideous.
But you could not accuse it of coming to the party in a little beige sweater.
I came upon an old minibus covered in flowers and peace symbols.
It was parked among modern cars.
It looked like a survivor from an era when someone genuinely believed painting a vehicle was enough to change the world.
*Flower Power.*
Colors.
Words.
Drawings.
A hippie relic wedged inside a city that was entrusting its revolution to cranes, hotels, and apartments with sea views.
I liked it immediately.
Not because I believed the minibus represented a more authentic life.
The word “authentic” is one of tourism’s great scams.
Travelers want to eat in authentic places, meet authentic people, cross authentic neighborhoods, and have authentic experiences.
Provided the food does not cause intestinal distress.
The people speak English.
The neighborhood is safe.
The experience can be booked online and canceled free of charge within twenty-four hours.
We want authenticity with insurance included.
The minibus was no more real than the towers.
It was simply another image.
Another era.
Another aesthetic promise.
Once we sold freedom through flowers painted on a van.
Now we sell it through a penthouse with a residents’ gym and a twenty-four-hour concierge.
The product changes.
The fear remains.
We want to believe owning the right object is enough to make us the right person.
A minibus.
An apartment.
A camera.
A new city.
A new body.
A new profile.
A new love.
Something capable of solving from the outside what we stubbornly continue to carry within.
The minibus remained parked.
Perhaps it meant nothing at all.
Someone was probably using it to sell something to tourists.
Given enough time, even the revolution always finds a way to accept contactless payments.
Not far away, an old tower appeared among the buildings.
A pointed roof.
Clocks.
Decorations.
Streetlights.
Behind it, the more recent volumes.
Batumi did not seem to have demolished the past.
It had simply built something much taller beside it—an effective technique for preserving memory while rendering it progressively invisible.
It was not a city divided in two.
Old and new.
Soviet and contemporary.
Authentic and artificial.
It was a layering.
Every era had left something behind.
The imperial age.
Soviet planning.
Post-Soviet tourism.
Investment.
Fashion.
The ambitions of rulers.
The tastes of architects.
The universal desire to build at least one thing large enough to keep posterity from forgetting the name of the person who paid for it.
Cities are autobiographies written by people who never agreed on the plot.
One chapter uses stone and balconies.
The next, concrete.
The one after that, reflective glass.
Each claims to represent the future.
No one rereads the previous pages.
Batumi looked like a manuscript revised by too many editors, some of them clearly drunk.
That was precisely what made it interesting.
Consistency reassures.
Contradiction tells a story.
Near the sea, I found a sculpture of dolphins.
They leaped upward.
Bodies frozen at the exact instant they left the water.
The real sea remained behind them.
Human beings have a peculiar obsession with reproducing what already exists.
We build dolphins in front of the sea.
Fountains beside rivers.
Plastic palms in places full of real ones.
We photograph a sunset instead of watching it, then look at the photograph to remember how we felt while we were busy not watching the sunset.
Living is not enough for us.
We have to produce a copy.
The copy reassures us.
We can keep it.
Share it.
Sell it.
The original moment, on the other hand, has the terrible manners to end.
Photography is born from this intolerance.
We want something to remain.
The face.
The light.
A city in transformation.
We press a button and tell time:
“I’m keeping this one.”
Time, naturally, does not give a fuck.
It leaves us the file.
Takes everything else.
The sun lit the metal.
The sea was blue.
The dolphins remained suspended.
I took the picture.
I was perfectly aware of the irony.
Not evolved enough to stop.
Batumi seemed to encourage that form of addiction.
Every element demanded to be preserved.
The tower.
The wheel.
The word.
The statue.
The heart.
The building.
The reflection.
It was a city full of exclamation points.
No sentence ended normally.
Everything had to be extraordinary!
New!
Iconic!
Unmissable!
Panoramic!
Exclusive!
If Batumi could have spoken through a real estate agent, it probably would have described even the sky as a rare investment opportunity with limited availability.
And yet I was not annoyed.
Not yet.
Its shamelessness amused me.
There is something liberating about people and places that admit they want to be seen.
False modesty is far more irritating.
Elegant cities pretend not to know how beautiful they are.
Batumi had already checked its reflection in every available surface and wanted your opinion, provided it was positive and preferably accompanied by a reservation.
It was vain.
But vanity is not always empty.
Sometimes it is hunger.
The desire to be seen often grows from a long time spent outside the frame.
Batumi had passed through empires, the Soviet Union, dissolutions, crises, political changes, and years in which the future seemed like a product unavailable in the region.
Now it wanted to catch up.
Quickly.
Perhaps too quickly.
But someone who arrives late to a party does not walk in slowly.
He throws open the door.
Orders a drink.
Talks louder than everyone else.
Tries to work out how much he has already missed and whom he has to sleep with to get invited to the next one.
The city was making up for lost time through height.
Every new floor said:
We are here too.
Every unusual structure added:
And we have no intention of being confused with anyone else.
I did not yet know the price.
That would come later.
During the first few days, I mostly saw the pose.
And the pose was magnificent.
Not because it was perfect.
Because it was trying so hard.
A city confident in its own beauty can afford to be restrained.
Batumi still seemed convinced that if it switched off a single light, someone would look elsewhere.
I knew the feeling.
We all do.
We live in an age that has turned existence into a permanent audition.
You have to be interesting.
Photogenic.
Productive.
Desirable.
Busy but serene.
Ambitious but spiritual.
Sexually free but emotionally available.
Rich without appearing attached to money.
Profound, preferably without forcing anyone to read more than a caption.
You need a story.
An aesthetic.
A project.
A compelling reason why a stranger should choose you over someone else.
Cities do the same thing.
They compete.
For flights.
For tourists.
For capital.
For photographs.
For the right to appear on that mental list of places a person hopes to visit before dying—or before the mortgage payments make the operation logistically unlikely.
Batumi was not merely building towers.
It was building a case for itself.
The sea.
The mountains.
The climate.
The casinos.
The hotels.
The boulevard.
The alphabet.
Ali and Nino.
A Ferris wheel.
Even a giant question in English.
*WHERE.*
The city had prepared the presentation.
All that was missing was a slide titled:
“Why You Should Desire Me.”
But every building was already an answer.
Photographing from above, I saw the waterfront stretching beneath me.
The beach.
The roads.
The hotels.
The towers.
The line of the water.
From that distance, everything looked orderly.
Past and future politely shared the same space.
The urban problems disappeared.
So did the people.
Only the design remained.
I was tempted to believe the photograph.
That is one of its worst powers.
A good composition can make any chaos look intentional.
It removes whatever disturbs.
Aligns.
Balances.
Waits for the light.
Turns a construction site into dynamism.
A contradiction into contrast.
Excess into character.
Photography does not necessarily lie.
It does something more sophisticated.
It chooses which truth to leave out.
In those first photographs, Batumi was a city projected forward.
A courageous destination.
An international coast.
An organism capable of reinventing itself.
It was all true.
It was not the whole truth.
But no first impression ever is.
People do not immediately show you the flooded rooms either.
We present ourselves through our best material.
The successful jokes.
The job.
The trips.
The confidence.
The well-formed opinions.
We do not begin a date by saying:
“Nice to meet you. These are my dysfunctional attachment patterns, here is a list of the people I have disappointed, and if the evening goes well, after dessert I can tell you why part of me interprets intimacy as a military threat.”
First we order a drink.
Smile.
Suck in our stomachs.
Batumi was sucking in its stomach.
I could not blame it.
It was our first date.
I returned to the word *WHERE.*
The sea continued behind the letters.
Some people walked.
Others took photographs.
The sky offered no answers.
Where?
The question could have been about the city.
Where was Batumi inside its own transformation?
Had it already left behind what it had been?
Had it arrived at what it wanted to become?
Or was it in that uncomfortable phase when you have thrown out the old furniture, the new pieces have not yet arrived, and for three weeks you eat sitting on a box while convincing yourself minimalism has spiritual benefits?
Batumi was in between.
Not completely post-Soviet.
Not completely Western.
Not European in the way Europe likes to define itself.
Not Asian in the lazy way we Europeans label everything we do not understand.
A Georgian city on the Black Sea, built from different historical layers and suddenly charged with becoming a symbol.
It was a lot of work.
Being yourself is complicated enough.
Being a tourist destination too requires adequate lighting and a respectable advertising budget.
Over the course of that month, I would come to know other Batumis.
The one made of apartment blocks.
Laundry hanging out.
Buses.
Vendors.
Dogs sleeping on sidewalks with greater confidence than the investors.
The Batumi of rain.
Of people sitting before the sea without photographing it.
Of streets that lit up at night and began producing money.
But this was my first Batumi.
The one that had chosen to show itself.
The city dressed for its audition.
The city of towers, giant letters, mechanical lovers, red hearts, Ferris wheels, and architecture apparently designed under the influence of substances traditional urban planning had not yet learned to classify.
I liked it.
Despite the bad taste.
Perhaps partly because of it.
Good taste is overrated.
It produces living rooms where no one dares put down a glass, and people so busy avoiding impropriety that they never say anything worth remembering.
Batumi put its glass wherever the fuck it pleased.
It might break the table.
At least the conversation would not be boring.
By the end of the first day, I had already photographed its ambition hundreds of times.
The coast.
The towers.
The wheel.
The statues.
The symbols.
The words.
I had followed exactly the path prepared for my gaze.
Batumi had auditioned.
I had been the unit still photographer.
I did not know whether it had gotten the part.
But I knew I would not forget the candidate.
Before leaving, I looked at the city’s profile one last time.
The buildings rose between the sea and the mountains.
Some already seemed to belong to the landscape.
Others gave the impression that they had landed during the night and had not yet communicated their intentions to the proper authorities.
Everything pointed upward.
Everything demanded attention.
Everything seemed to say:
This is what we will become.
It was a promise.
Or a threat.
The best sentences are both.
I took another picture.
Batumi already knew how to make itself seen.
I had not yet understood whether it knew who it was.
But perhaps, in our time, that distinction has become useless.
First you construct the image.
Then wait for someone to come live inside it.
The next morning, I left the waterfront.
All I had to do was cross a few streets.
Behind the towers, I found balconies, concrete, tired windows, and laundry hung out to dry.
The future, I discovered, was still living with the past.
And apparently letting it do the laundry.