The Photo That Shouldn’t Exist

The last photo I ever took was never supposed to exist. By all accounts, it had been confiscated. Erased by someone in a uniform who looked at me the way you look at gum stuck to the underside of your shoe. But photography has a funny way of disobeying authority. A shutter snaps and a memory comes alive. Try as they might, some memories cannot be expunged. 

My story begins with a camera: a Leica M6, scratched at the edges and way older than I was. My grandfather had carried it through two revolutions, three arrests, and a lifetime of telling stories no one wanted to hear.

Grandpa always used to say cameras were like truth serum for history. “A photograph is a kind of memory,” he told me once, cleaning the lens with the same cloth he had used for decades. “People will argue about words, but an image? An image will haunt them.”

When he died, I inherited the camera and the responsibility that came along with it. Little did I know what I was in for.

The day my life changed, the market was packed. The streets were lined with hollow-eyed vendors pushing whatever scraps they had left. The produce was wilted, the meat turning gray, and the bread so stale it could break teeth. But hunger makes people buy things they wouldn’t otherwise touch. Women in headscarves haggled over figs. Old men bickered about soccer as if it were the only thing left to care about. A father, ribs poking through his torn shirt, held his daughter close, afraid, perhaps, that if he let go for even a second, she would disappear into the mouth of the city, swallowed whole by the war that never seemed to end.

I don’t know if it was just the August breeze, but the entire city was sweltering with heat and the restless energy that cities often get when they’re on the brink of something big. 

A boy who couldn’t have been more than fifteen swooped past me, ducking and dodging every which way. He had the look of someone who’d been running long before his feet had even hit the ground. He zig-zagged through the crowd like he had done this before. His dusty clothes billowed as he raced through the throng of marketgoers, all as emaciated as he. The boy clutched a stolen loaf of bread as if it were the most precious thing in the world, and maybe to him, it was. His fingers, caked with dirt, were locked so tightly around it that even his dark knuckles looked bone-white against the tan of the crust. I wondered how he could run so fast while missing a shoe.

Instinctively, I lifted my camera, framing the moment before it had a chance to escape me. Click.

“You have a thing for photographing thieves?” a voice drawled beside me.

I turned to find Danya smirking at me, her beady eyes sharp as ever. We had known each other since grade school, but she made a habit of pretending we were strangers in public. It was probably safer that way. Her dark curls were pulled back just enough to make her look forgettable. Since she was young, Danya had been good at blending in. It’s what kept her alive.

“We’re all thieves,” I replied, still focused on the viewfinder. “Some of us are just better at getting away with it…I like taking pictures of the truth.”

She snorted. “And what truth is that?”

I never got the chance to answer. The sirens did it for me. They cried out in a panic. Not the lazy wail of some politician’s motorcade. The other kind. The kind that doubles pulses makes parents whisper prayers to themselves and causes old men to straighten their spines and pale with horror. The kind grandpa had always warned me about. “Watch closely,” he used to say. “That’s when they don’t want you looking.”

Within seconds, everyone around me scattered like birds who just caught wind of a storm on the way. Stalls slammed shut, the music stopped, and suddenly, except for the blare of the sirens, the bustling market was dead silent. The people in my city were smart enough to know when to hide. 

I, on the other hand, never had the sense to. Running away was never in my nature. Instead, I turned towards what everyone else was hiding from, camera already in my hands.

From the start, I could tell how this was going to end. I had seen the aftermath too many times: the bloodstains scrubbed clean before sunrise, the family that spoke about their son in the past tense, the mother whose eyes never looked the same again. A young boy with brown skin takes overpriced food he cannot afford, and men with guns decide that means his life is theirs to take. It was routine where I come from.

But this time was going to be different. It had to be. This time, I had my camera. I raised it. The boy must’ve noticed me because he turned his head just for a second. Click. 

“We need to go,” Danya muttered, but I wasn’t listening.

I raised the camera once more. This time, the boy inexplicably flashed me a sad, knowing smile as if we knew something the rest of the world had yet to find out.

And then, like a stone dropped into a river, there was a ripple. I barely had time to react before the camera was yanked from my grip. 

A large man shoved me against a wall. “You’re interfering,” he growled. I looked up at him, almost challenging him to look back at me. He didn’t like that.

Another soldier ripped the film from my camera, unspooling it like intestines. It was almost as if history could be unwound and erased in a matter of seconds. I didn’t fight it. Strips of celluloid fluttered to the ground like a dying butterfly. I looked down at it and thought: Gone. It’s gone. I knew it had never been alive, but a part of me felt like I was grieving a loss. Perhaps I felt as though I had let my grandfather down.

Except it wasn’t, and I didn’t. Photography doesn’t exist just in the photo itself. It exists in the memory. And what I had forgotten in the rush of it all was that before they had grabbed me, torn the camera away, and stolen the moment—I had already taken another shot, this time with my phone. It may not have been my best work, but it would do the trick.

They all sat in my pocket. The boy. The soldiers. The moment they swore no one would remember. But I remembered. And now, so would everyone else.

That night, I sat in my room, staring at the image glowing on my screen. The boy, weathered by what was surely malnutrition and dehydration, had barely any fight in him left. It looked as though he could crumble any second. His teary eyes seemed to be looking straight at me. I think I saw a little of myself in him. The soldiers behind him were a blur. Their faces were grim and mean. Even just looking at the photo, I could feel the boy’s fear, anger, and exhaustion as if it were my own.

I sent it to Danya.

“We can’t keep it,” she messaged. “They’ll come looking.”

“They’ll come looking anyway,” I typed back.

Not long after, the photo spread. Someone projected it onto the side of a building. Someone else printed it onto banners. Someone—somewhere—sent it to a newspaper that had just enough courage to publish it. As it turns out, my grandfather was right. People will argue about words, but an image will haunt them. The photo moved faster than I did. By morning, it was everywhere: on the news, on posters, in the hands of the hungry, the beaten, the forgotten—the ones who had nothing left to lose.

The government scrambled. First, they denied it and claimed it was fake. Then, they did what they always did: they came looking for me.

The knock at my door was loud enough to wake me from my sleep. I froze, knowing even by the eerie rhythm of the knock that it meant trouble. Before even a second had passed, my phone vibrated with a message from Danya.

Danya: They know. Get out.

I barely had time to move before the door burst open. There was nowhere to go. Two men without uniforms towered over me. That was the worst part of it all. Uniforms meant rules. These men didn’t have to follow anything.

“Come with us,” one said almost robotically. 

Soon, they shoved me, handcuffed and bruised,  into the back of a van and drove me far away. The car snaked through the streets of the city I had grown up in, but looking out the rusty, bolted window, everything around me suddenly felt foreign.

The room they put me in reeked of cigarette smoke and fear-soaked sweat. I could imagine whoever had been here last must have been as afraid as I was. The room had no windows, only a single chair and a table with a fist-shaped dent in the middle.

“Where is the original?” said the impeccably dressed man before me. His suit was too crisp, and his watch was too expensive. From how he dressed and carried himself, I understood that he was the kind of man who never got blood on his hands but always knew exactly where it was spilled. Somehow, that scared me even more than the soldiers.

I said nothing.

He leaned forward and smiled the kind of smile wolves give before they eat their prey. “You think one picture changes anything?”

I didn’t answer. 

As much as I wanted to scream, to cry, to make him pay for what he and the rest have done to my city, I kept quiet. Because I knew something he didn’t: by the time they dragged me here, the photo would have already become more significant than me. It had become a symbol, and nothing they did to me or that boy could stop what was coming. I may have laid the groundwork for the revolution, but I trusted my people to finish it. You can arrest a single person but can’t arrest an image.

They let me go two days later. Maybe because they thought I was just a kid with a camera. Maybe they thought fear would shut me up. They were wrong.

The city had changed in forty-eight hours. The walls were covered in posters, and the market was again buzzing with something even more dangerous than before.

Hope.

Danya was waiting for me outside.

“Looks like your truth has really made a difference,” she said.

I exhaled. “It’s not my truth anymore.”

She nodded. “Good. That means they can’t get rid of it.”

And for the first time since that shutter had snapped, I believed her.

Because a photograph is more than just an image. It’s the past clawing its way into the present. A reckoning for the oppressed. A revolution in the making. Proof of our survival and resistance.

And so, with the flash of a camera, the moment they had sworn no one would remember had become something they would never forget.