The Weight of the Stride

I have always been suspicious of the man in the suit. There is a performance in the tailoring, a rigid architecture meant to signal that the wearer is going somewhere important, that he has a destination that justifies the starch and the seam. It feels like a costume designed to keep the world at a distance. My instinct is to see it as a mask—a way to hide the messy, unscripted reality of a human life behind a wall of wool and sharp edges. I wanted to find the artifice here, to pick apart the pretense of the posture and the calculated speed of the walk. But the more I looked, the less I saw a man playing a part. I saw instead the sheer, exhausting effort of keeping one’s shape in a world that is constantly trying to blur us. It is not a mask; it is a barricade. What does it cost a person to hold themselves together so perfectly while the rest of the world rushes by in a blur of indifference?

Fidan Nazim Qizi has captured this tension in her image titled Men with Suit. It is a quiet study of a man trying to remain solid in a liquid city. Does his stride look like purpose to you, or is it just a way to keep from falling apart?