Alive Or Not?

It’s a fraction of a gesture—half a figure, half a scene, the rest left to suggestion. The photograph wasn’t staged; I caught it walking past a mirrored office entrance. A man stood statue-still in the morning light, the crisp shirt collar slightly rumpled, his cardigan misaligned, tie pulled just a bit too tight. And in his hand, a cigarette—not lit, not smoked, merely held. Suspended. That detail alone tilted the entire scene into ambiguity.

Technically, the image relies heavily on contrast—natural, unforgiving light from the left collides with deep shadows on the right. The tonal division reinforces the emotional ambivalence. It’s clean, yes, but harsh. The edges of the shirt and hand cut sharply against the dark fabric, while the golden wall introduces warmth that the subject’s body fails to echo. The photograph is overexposed on the left margin and slightly under on the right, but I chose not to correct it in post. That imbalance holds the tension I wanted to preserve.

Compositionally, this is a deliberate departure from full-figure portraiture. I framed it to cut just above the chin, pushing the eye downward to the subtle flex of the wrist and the unlit cigarette—an object that feels almost like a question. It’s cropped tightly enough to press the viewer into the scene, but loose enough to allow uncertainty. The decision to leave the face out wasn’t aesthetic—it was instinctive. I wasn’t photographing a person so much as a moment in between personhoods: poised between action and inertia, presence and absence.

What fascinates me in retrospect is how still the image is. It lacks narrative movement, and that stasis is its strength. We don’t know whether this man is about to take a drag, drop the cigarette, or simply stand there until it burns itself out. And maybe he doesn’t know either.

Photography can reveal what it doesn’t explain. That was the case here. I looked at this frame later and realised it wasn’t about smoking, or business attire, or urban rituals. It was about signs of life—the kind that don’t speak loudly. Sometimes, the faintest breath of heat from a cigarette is all the proof we get.