Everyone who travels by themselves knows the feeling of anonymity, when no one really knows exactly where you are in the world, or what exactly you are doing. And the further you are culturally from home, the greater its intensity can feel. Photojournalist Jeff Hutchens explores that feeling in this experimental short.
Thousands of feet above the earthen crust you cruise at altitude, bathed in the exhalation of others, while wingtip strobes staccato blush the riveted metal that surrounds you.
And while you drift in and out of sleep, flying further away from home, you cross datelines, and pass through plains of lingual dominance as English grammar dissolves into unfamiliar tones.
Descending through night clouds, you look down to see the tungsten dots of naked filaments eking out their existence like dying embers spit from the shacks nesting in shadowed hillsides.
Then you wonder, did you remember to turn off your hall light?
As the tires skid and add their rubber signature to this foreign runway's hieroglyphs, you take one last breath of pressurized air, tap your passport in your pocket, and exit into a new land, a blank persona, traveling anonymously.
Ulaanbaatar. N'Djamena. Ankara. Kyoto. Manaus. Kolkata. Pittsburgh.
Once you leave, no one knows you were there.
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