Ebrahim

I went out with my art director Amanda on one of those surreal outings that have no practical purpose or significance to shoot our mutual friend Ebrahim whom I only vaguely know until today. I met Ebrahim in a debate competition in high school which feels like eons ago, and again last week during the Harvard Leadership Trek organized in our school. It was impulsive but minutes into our reunion (of having to tilt my neck just to look him in the eye) I wanted him in one of my shoots and pleasantly surprisingly he was all right with it. Later during the week Amanda and I were excitingly discussing the prospects of collaboration: her ideas and my photography, and when I told her of my recruitment of Ebrahim she nearly screamed from the uncanny parallels in our visions.

So today we met up in SS15, had burgers in Burger Factory and then commenced shooting! Pre-shoot I was my usual pessimistic self-doubting persona of "What am I doing" and "So many things can go wrong" but the shoot went pretty well. Of course there was an initially awkward phase when Ebrahim would be extremely self-conscious of every passer-by and bored shopkeeper who would stare as they took interest in our little photoshoot. He would apologize to most of them which was funny because we hadn't done anything wrong or even offensive.

Eventually we hit a photo high when we were shooting in this graffitied alleyway. We borrowed some demo skateboards from the skateshop nearby and with the addition of a prop he became a lot more comfortable and my favourite shot of the day was probably the one taken here.