hostel creature (limited edition print) · Kyrgyzstan · 2018

Hostels are anthropological petri dishes, in which all sorts of creatures mingle: Sick Dudes, Awesome Mates, Future Friends, And Others. Everyone is someone who does something. A common technique to scan people’s surface is the following line of questioning: “where you from, how long have you been traveling, where you headed?” Some dig deeper into their conversational partners in hopes of finding versions of themselves in likeminded others. And then there are the occasional oddballs, refreshing palate cleansers so fluid in shape that no label sticks to them. Like the kind of guy bolting into a Kyrgyz dorm late at night, wrapped into a dark coat and darker mystery, insinuating a committed murder with a face so stern that it couldn’t possibly be used to insinuate anything else, but being all jovial and no longer hangry after a midnight snack, now casually clarifying that the murder victim was he himself, killed by a society that had not prevented his near starvation leading to strokes and nerve damage, and alleging that some Balinese villagers worship him and his wife as reincarnations of Hindu gods, before putting on his Kermit sleeping mask.
 
 
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tags: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, portrait, candid, documentary, photojournalism, funny, face, travel, bedroom, horizontal