After several years of photographing Bali, I found myself searching for new approaches. Much of what I was making felt visually flat. The environment, while rich in color and ritual, offered few opportunities for spatial complexity. The streets are narrow and densely built, often without footpaths, and walking with a camera means staying close to walls or traffic. It leaves little room to observe, to step back, or to wait.

This limitation ultimatley shaped how I worked. I became aware that the way the streets were constructed — compact, functional, frontal — was influencing the structure of my images. Everything was rendered on a single visual plane. And I was looking for more.

I had always been drawn to the foot carts — kaki lima — scattered throughout the island. I knew that visually there was something going on and eventually, I realized they offered something the street itself didn’t: layers. Their glass panels reflected and refracted the world around them. Words printed on the surface merged with what was behind and what passed by. They created collisions — between ritual and routine, people and signage, movement and stillness — that brought depth into the frame.

This work came out of that process — a way to photograph the street by not looking directly at it, but through it, allowing reflections, surfaces, and fragments to speak in place of the obvious.