A Torn Poster
I dont usually stop to photograph posters. They blur into the background of daily life those layers of paper, dates, demands, warnings, fundraisers, pleas. Most are glanced at and forgotten. But the one I saw this morning stopped me mid stride.
It wasnt even intact.
In fact, someone had tried quite forcefully to tear it down. The surface was shredded, text half obscured, the image beneath scraped and clawed at as if someone wanted the story erased. But even broken, the message still forced its way through the ripped paper and early morning light.
In the centre, under the torn layers, was the figure of a woman. Her face wasnt shown, just the silhouette of a hood, and inside that shape were the words:
“My sons legs were cut off. I tied his legs with my hijab and carried him for 4 km.”
Even fractured by the rips and scratches, the sentence hit like a punch to the chest.
I stood there longer than I meant to, the street moving around me people going to work, buses hissing past, the routine rhythm of an ordinary day somehow out of step with the extraordinary suffering described in a few hand drawn words.
Later, I looked up the story behind the artwork. What I found was heartbreaking: a mother fleeing unimaginable violence, carrying her injured child through chaos and danger, clinging to life with nothing but courage and a piece of fabric turned tourniquet.
It is one thing to read about war or displacement in the abstract, but another to hear a single moment of it one mother, one child, one impossible decision. That is the power of testimony. It narrows the distance. It refuses to let you stay detached.
What struck me almost as much as the message was the attempt to destroy it. The tearing felt symbolic, as though someone had tried not just to remove a poster, but to silence a story. Maybe it made them uncomfortable. Maybe the truth was too heavy for their morning commute. Maybe acknowledging someone elses pain felt like more than they wanted to carry.
But even torn, the image spoke.
Maybe even more powerfully because it was torn.
In a world where stories like this are too easily dismissed, erased, or submerged under the next news cycle, this damaged poster on a damp street insisted on being seen. It forced a moment of reflection I hadnt expected on an ordinary morning.
I dont often take photographs of posters. But this one wasnt just paper glued to a wall. It was a fragment of a life lived in the harshest conditions someones reality, someones trauma, someones love for their child made visible, if only in a few haunting words.
I walked away with the sense that sometimes the things we try hardest to tear down are the very truths we most need to confront.
And some stories, no matter how damaged the surface, refuse to disappear.
