Grey sky. Rather cold. A quite big city, yet entirely empty.

I don't even remember its name - somewhere in northern France, a place whose name slipped away the moment I arrived. I was the only person on the streets, the shops and restaurants were closed. Surely it was a Monday in France.

Walking there felt like a living Skansen - or rather, a dead one. A leftover of the preserved monument of the joyful place it once was. My analogue camera became the quiet observer of this sad reality.
Patient, silent, honest, non-judgmental.

But a camera only records the frames of what the eye sees.

Seeing the seen can be difficult. Seeing the unseen can bring joy.

Imagining how it once was, when life was still there - the music from an open window, a couple at a table, a chef in the doorway, people alive and laughing in a city that had simply forgotten, for a moment, how to be - before the change that made the city and the hearts empty. This emptiness brought to the surface in me the collage of how life could be, if it was still pulsating there.

To practice conscious seeing is to see beyond the seen and to see also what wants to be remembered, but has left.