A sailor, a prostitute, a city, and the flicker of stolen time, Shore Leave unfolds as a photo-roman, a short story told through image and text, where longing and language slip between what is seen and what remains unsaid.

The work uses the stillness of photographs and the movement of narrative to trace a desire that resists measure. Set adrift in a cityscape, the work captures a brief encounter between bodies, between words, between a search for warmth and the cold precision of time ticking away.

Shore Leave is part of Raqs’ ongoing engagement with the photo-roman form: a genre that sits between cinema and literature, fiction and memory, duration and stasis.