Alien Landscapes, a set on Flickr.
These photographs are from the Cambridge-Somerville area in Massachusetts, a mile away from where one of the Boston bombers lived.
I lived in this area for a year as an international student from India and unknowingly shared a temporal and physical landscape with Tamerlan Tsarnaev. But did I also share a mental landscape?
I too was an immigrant there. I too was a student. I too felt alienated at times, and did not always comprehend my surroundings. These photographs were my attempt to come to terms with my environment. Unfortunately Tamerlan chose a different form of self-expression.
By acknowledging that we had something in common, however fleeting, I now hope to make some sense of the incomprehensible destruction in a place that eventually became very dear to me – a place that will always remain a second home.
