Voyages is a photographic journal of life in the sky, comprising photographs taken across the world over the better part of a decade and issued as NFTs.

Voyages is my attempt at making sense of incessant travel, incessant displacement and the non-stop longing that this creates. Longing for a sense of home, longing for company, longing to belong.

I have been on the move since I was born. My military family lived out of literal moving boxes. These were large wooden crates that were stored in the garage between moves. Every 2 or 3 years we’d pack all our belongings into these boxes and load them into a truck. We would then pile into the family car and follow the truck to the next airbase. By the time we graduated, my brother and I had attended 7 high schools.

A few weeks after graduating high school I saw an ad in the paper calling for applications to join the Merchant Navy, (or Merchant Marine as it’s called in the US). I answered, and about 5 months later was on a flight to Zurich, then Antwerp and from there boarded my first merchant ship. The Ship’s cadet is the youngest onboard and is expected to do everything from swabbing decks and greasing machinery to learning the nuances of celestial navigation.

I’ve always said, if work is worship then the ship is a temple. While cruise ships carry thousands of people at any given time, life on a cargo ship with her crew of 24 can make for a monk-like existence. No outsiders, no internet or email back then. Satellite calls would cost 7 USD a minute. This was on a 400 USD a month stipend. As for the work? The work on the ship is never done.

I’m so grateful for my years at sea. I never saw them as precious back then, but I do now. I hated being cut off from humanity like that. And that too during what I thought were the prime years of my life, my 20’s. I would not be who I am today if it wasn’t for those years.

I left behind my life at sea in 2007 and enrolled in a flight school in Tulsa Oklahoma.

Flight school is where I found a new purpose and is also where I found Ozark. I was reinventing myself, I was spending all of my savings (and a large part of my Parents’ savings) to fund my pilot’s license.

Once I graduated from flight school with my CPL I flew back to India via Graceland (remind me when we meet IRL and I’ll tell you the story!) and joined an airline as a co-pilot.

Airline life was as hectic as ever. It was common to fly 4 sectors a day, 6 days a week. Add to this I also moved several bases in a few years, which is common for a junior co-pilot. My itinerant flying life was so similar yet so different to my life at sea.

I found myself missing the sea, the fresh air, the sunrises and sunsets, spotting the occasional whale or pod of dolphins, the crystal clear night skies. What I did not miss was life on the ship, being isolated from the rest of humanity for weeks and months at a time.

After a few years of flying domestic, I joined a large international airline (moving not just another base but another country this time) and started flying all over the world, revisiting many of the places I had been as a sailor.

The need for Voyages manifested in 2012; it wasn’t until I reached my 30’s that I started to question what all of this incessant travel meant and how it was shaping me.

Out of a fear of losing direction and purpose in the future, I started to feel the urgent need to examine and understand my past.

This is where the seed of Voyages was sown.

Those of you who know me, know that I read incessantly. My reading habit is something our mother instilled in my brother and me by reading to us at bedtime all the way until we were teens.

Based on the books I was reading at the time, I saw a path to examining my life through art and expression. The only two artistic mediums I had already been practicing regularly were writing and photography.

My relationship with my partner at the time was on rocky ground, and some of the rose tinted worldview that I had carried with me thus far started to fade away.

Where before I carried my camera everywhere and shot portraits of friends, family and strangers at every gathering, I found myself leaving the camera at home more and more.

Not long thereafter I found myself taking pictures of the sky and portraits of clouds. I had certainly taken pictures like these before, but the intent then was simply to document. I was now shooting to understand.

I began writing, taking ‘prototype photos’ and worked on understanding how best to express and present Voyages. The earliest photograph in the final collection is from 2015, the latest was shot in 2019.

Voyages are Equivalents. The art in Voyages is as much in the composition and aesthetic as it is in my lived experience. I wrote about this here.

Voyages was shot almost entirely from the air. There are two photographs in the entire collection taken from Terra Firma. One was was taken whilst on holiday in Malawi and the other in the departures terminal at Charles De Gaulle international.

By issuing Voyages as NFTs I get to integrate several things I am very passionate about; art, community, libertarianism, the decentralisation of power structures, and permissionless expression.

Voyages is loosely grouped into 6 series: Civilisation, Company, Gaia, Portrait, Sky & Triptychs.

Voyages Triptychs are still a work in progress and will arrive in perhaps a month or two, maybe more.

My photographs contain lots of distortions, artefacts, smudges etc. Aircraft windows are designed for safety under extreme conditions over decades of flight cycles, and not for photographic clarity.

Some of these glitches I correct in post if it distracts from what I'm trying to achieve with the photograph. Most of the time I leave them in.

As for sensor artefacts, I have only ever owned 2 DSLRs so far, both Canons: a 400D and now a 6D full frame. All of Voyages was shot with my trusty old 6D and a 40mm 2.8 ‘pancake’ lens. The sensor has definitely deteriorated over the last decade… but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

A note on ‘Matching Voyages’ or ‘Linked Voyages’

As you browse through and spend some time with the collection, you will notice there are more than a few Voyages that are essentially the same scene but shot from two points a few nautical miles apart (the aircraft travels at approximately 8 nm per minute) in such a way as to make the two photographs a diptych or dyad.

Each of the pair are tagged in their metadata with “DYAD”.

You can view all Voyages photographs in this gallery. Under each photograph is its name, owner (if any), and some other metadata such as DYAD.

Self portrait. 2005 or 2006.

I happen to remember this was taken somewhere in the Indian Ocean on a Voyage between Brazil and Japan.