Encounters at Euro 2025 Parade

As I joined the celebration of England Women’s Euro 2025 victory on my lunch break this Tuesday, in the short hour I had, I was keenly aware of how diverse the supporters around me were. And this is something genuinely admirable about this country and this football team in particular — of course, always relatively speaking.

Still, I don’t think I fully succeeded in capturing that diversity through my project’s lens, which felt like a real shame. Maybe it’s partly my own prejudice, or the residual fears from growing up under a specific kind of religious state and culture — but this project has shown me that some people are simply less open to being photographed in the way I try to photograph them. And as personal and contextual as that hesitation might be, I can’t help but sense cultural patterns too.

For someone like me who doesn’t even get the right ethnicity box to tick on the governmental forms in this country, someone who aspires rising above personal privileges and disadvantages, this photo series is not about having a ‘thing’ for white women. It’s about the appreciation of women’s freedom, which feels to me like one of the clearest signs and most powerful engines of liberal progress and human flourishing.

So when I come across a mother and her teenaged daughters — so open, trusting, and at ease with each other and with me behind the camera — it warms my heart. An elevated encounter across cultures and personal histories, and very much worth photographing.

PS: Interestingly, the jeans of these two shining young women remind me of the recent ‘blue genes’ ad campaign controversy in the US, which in some ways relates to what I’m reflecting on here.

This photo is taken within my ongoing photography project called In Search of Elevated Moments of Coexistence.