The Day the Sky Turned Black

Here, I was stood on my roof... I’d gone to see what the situation was - you can smell smoke long before you can see it- and then when I looked out, the horizon disappeared.

From numerous spots across the city, smoke, thick and immense, rises and moves into a unified dark wall traversing the sky above.

The picture shows protests occurring, the fires started that day were of an intense scale and visible from every roof-top in Kathmandu, vehicles burning, buildings burning, the smoke sits in the throat rather than simply blotting the sun.

What was so strange was that the city below remained unaffected in its mundane nature- laundry on roof-top rails, water-tanks simply existing- with this inferno of smoke raging above, which the entire city, regardless of location, continued to inhale.

In Kathmandu, bad air builds gradually- traffic, dust, kilns, a bad season for wind, and so you barely notice it; this happened instantaneously, and it was impossible to turn a blind eye.

The protests had numerous purposes, but when viewing this picture, what it makes me think of constantly, is how a single day can impact months of breathing and how precious, and ultimately fragile, the air is, that the air around us is able to alter, so rapidly, into this.