“I was on a boat, moving slowly. The city passed me by like a thought I almost remembered.”
This photograph was taken from the deck of a small boat gliding down the Danube in Vienna, not from a fixed point, but from a place in motion, in transition, in-between.
I didn’t plan to take it. I simply saw her, a woman walking alone, a path traced through yellowing grass, a building behind her so featureless it felt like it had forgotten its own purpose. It was just a fleeting moment. The boat kept moving, but I pressed the shutter before it disappeared.
That’s what this work is about: the fleeting, the blurred, the not-quite-there. From the water, everything on land looked soft, unreal, already half-lost. So I processed the image not to reveal, but to reflect the way it felt: as if I were looking into a dream I didn’t own.
The Danube here isn’t scenic, it’s silent, heavy, full of the things we pass by without noticing. This river has carried soldiers, refugees, emperors, tourists. It knows how to forget. Or maybe it just doesn’t stop for us.
In this image, Vienna becomes a memory. The figures are anonymous. The light is washed out. The lines dissolve. It is not about place, it is about disconnection. A view from the edge of something, a city, a life, a moment, already slipping away.
I was not standing still.
The image wasn’t either.
BASSEM H. BOUSTANY Photography 
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