By Shubhi Mishra: If you are looking for something that will absolutely tug at your heartstrings, stop your search as we have the perfect video for you. So, a photographer asked an elderly Sikh man to pose for some pictures at his grocery shop. A clip of the same has gone viral online and it is too sweet for words.

The now-viral video was shared on Instagram by a photographer named Sutej Pannu. The clip started with Pannu walking up to an elderly Sikh man who was sitting at his grocery shop. He asked him to give 10 candies and two packets of chips. Later, Pannu asked if he could photograph him at his shop.

The man obliged and posed for the photographs as directed. Pannu also printed one of the photographs instantly and gave it to the man. “That is very kind of you. Thank you so much, wish you a long life,” the elderly man said.

The man’s gratitude will make you cry happy tears, for sure!

Sutej also wrote a heartfelt caption about self-awareness and spiritual awakening while sharing the video.

“One of the most powerful aspects of spiritual awakening is the heightened sense of self-awareness that comes with it. Through self-reflection and introspection, individuals become more attuned to their thoughts, emotions, and behaviours,” read an excerpt from the caption.

Watch the viral video here:

The video has amassed over a million views since being shared online. Instagram users were quite overwhelmed after watching the clip.

“Why do I always cry with every video of yours? You so capture the hearts of the fantastic people of Punjab,” a user wrote.

Another user commented, “The way he said ‘Meri?’ as though it was shocking to him that someone would show an interest in him. It seemed like he had tears in his eyes by the end of it and not only was he grateful for the photo but also for the short amount of time spent interacting.”

See the comments here:

Even Sonam Bajwa reacted to the clip and was quite emotional.

Take a look:

We are not crying, you are!

As Duke men’s tennis forms their pre-game huddle against Wake Forest in late March, a seemingly extra team member walks into Ambler Stadium with a similar sense of purpose — except this team member has long dark hair and a Nikon D5 camera instead of a racket.    

Director of Athletics Photography Natalie LeDonne launches herself into the chaos of screaming Duke athletes.    

“Blue! Devils! Blue! Devils! Go Duke on three! One, two, three!”   

She’s tucked between junior Faris Khan and first-year Pedro Rodenas, close enough to snap the energy while positioned right outside their circle. Keeping a “respectful distance” is overrated. She’s immersed.   

“Go Duke!”   

Poised to shoot, Nat seems more ready to catch the first point than the players are to score it. If you look away for a second, she’s gone, teleported to another court. She’s perched on a bench, squatting behind a recycling bin or crouched next to a bright red Wilson tennis bag so big it almost seems like she could fit into it. Eyes aren’t often on her, but her eyes are on everyone and everything. She doesn’t miss a moment.      

Well, maybe a few. Nat looks behind her shoulder in mild disappointment as sophomore Connor Krug and first-year Teddy Truwit win their first doubles set against the Demon Deacons — even the best of sports photographers can’t catch it all.  

In 2021, Nat was featured in the U.S. Lacrosse Magazine after she captured the winning shots and saves of Duke men versus Syracuse and Carolina a week prior. Her photos have been published on ESPNW, Swimming World Magazine and the ACC Network.    

“When Nat started and came to photograph Duke football practices, I told her to take pictures of the quarterback,” Lunn said. “And she said, ‘What’s a quarterback?’”    

Nowadays, Nat’s finger is on the pulse of all 27 Duke teams. Two hours ago, it was women’s tennis. Tomorrow, women’s lacrosse. Right now, her lens is focused on the tensing jaw of the men’s tennis head coach. 

It almost seemed natural for Nat to end up on a college campus. Nat and her mom Patricia moved around Virginia while Pat worked in college admissions, settling at Roanoke College. Her aunts, uncles and grandparents all worked in education, from kindergarten teachers to biology professors.    

Pat adopted Nat from rural China when she was 9 months old. 

“When I picked her up from the orphanage, they had nicknamed her Yi Feng Zhang, which translates to Mighty Phoenix,” said Pat, who raised Nat as a single mom. “She was sick, stubborn, and feisty, but she was a fighter.”   

The two took to each other quickly, and it’s been Pat and Nat ever since.

After second grade, Nat transferred to Holy Cross Catholic Regional School in Lynchburg, VA. The family started a tradition of shopping for shoes, the only way Nat could show her identity in a school uniform. Neon orange Nikes, to be exact.     

“I think I probably have like 17 or 18 pairs now,” Nat said, laughing. Her current favorites are a pair of Air Max 270s.     

Despite an uncharacteristic dislike for watching professional sports — “It’s only interesting if I know the players,” she said — Nat grew up playing volleyball, basketball and soccer. Sports followed her to Lynchburg College, where she took up photography in the athletics department. In her sophomore year, she won a summer internship with the Minnesota Zoo.

“I left her at a reptile trainer’s house. The place was full of aquariums, snakes, and hawks eating mice on the dresser,” Pat said. “It was probably one of the hardest things I did as a mom, but one of the best things for her.”     

The next summer, Nat interned at the North Carolina Zoo. Fully intending to go into zoo photography, a freelancing opportunity at a Virginia Tech football game upended her plans.

Metallica’s Enter Sandman boomed over the loudspeakers. Students jumped to the beat, waving orange pom poms wildly. The energy was addictive. Nat was hooked.   

Senior year spring brought Lunn to Lynchburg’s campus, where a brief connection and lots of likes dropped by Nat on Lunn’s instagram led to Nat’s first job at Duke — shooting football and basketball games. She made the two-and-a-half-hour commute to Durham two to three times a week.

“Nat’s always been a risk-taker in many ways,” Pat said. 

The long drives in her 2003 Honda CRV and spending Thanksgiving and Christmas freelancing proved worthwhile. Nat graduated in 2018 from Lynchburg with a degree in communications and art, and that very August she was working full-time at Duke.

We planned to meet in her office the day before the Wake Forest tennis match. As she sat down in the oversized swivel chair behind her desk, she admitted that the pictures of the Labrador and the memorabilia on the shelves didn’t belong to her — it was technically Lunn’s office that they shared. 

My offer to move outside was met with a sigh of relief and, “Yes, please! I’m trying to work on my tan!”      

She stretched herself across two chairs, feet up, soaking in the sun. On her wrist was a neon orange watch. At times, I found myself feeling more interviewed than the other way around. Nat is working on a tattoo sleeve of all 50 states on her right arm — her last one was the Kansas state flower — but somehow the attention turned to a corgi sticker on my phone case.  

“Do you have a corgi?” she asked excitedly. My answer was barely out when she started inquiring about the other stickers. “What does this one say …”     

As we chatted about Duke Athletics and I rattled off friends on different teams, Nat’s face lit up. “Oh my gosh, Ellie on tennis! She’s the sweetest!” 

Rarely could I bring up a name that she didn’t recognize. “Alayna? I helped her with her Italian homework! Or tried to, at least,” she said with a small laugh at her dyslexia and ADD. 

This is what she’s good at. 

“In the studio, Nat makes the student athletes she works with feel so comfortable,” said Madison Olmo, a producer/editor for Blue Devil Network and friend of Nat. “She brings out their personalities beyond the stoic athletics photos that you normally see.”

Her role as the observer instead of the observed comes from an innate sincerity and curiosity, a genuine desire to learn more about her subjects. 

“She refers to the athletes as ‘her athletes,’” said Liv Warren, Nat’s girlfriend. “She tries to connect with each and every one of them.” 

Nat would never admit it, but she’s a campus celebrity among Duke Athletics. Every athlete knows the tattooed, Luke Combs-loving photographer with an affinity for puns, and every Duke employee knows of her undying loyalty and meticulous work ethic.     

“Nat’s a unicorn,” Lunn said. He’s right. 

Editor’s Note: Christina Ferrari is co-captain of the Duke fencing team.

Dialect, 2020-2023
Photo: © Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023 courtesy Loose Joints

When Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán met nine young Moroccan migrants in southern Spain, he felt a sense of kinship that led him to embark on a three-year-long project. Beltrán, a migrant himself, has long been disturbed by the oversimplified and often sensationalized images of immigrants portrayed in documentary photography. “You always see the tragic or the epic, where people are getting off boats or trying to survive in the cold,” Beltrán tells the Cut. “Documentary has this strong way of representing ‘the other’ in a way we know came from the last century, but we have to rethink it. We have to start once again from another point of view.”

His new book, Dialect, captures the agency of these young migrants, allowing them to express their identity on their own terms rather than as society often dictates it. The photographic series follows the boys as they are held in state custody in Seville, Spain, a transit point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean Sea in search of legal status. (Undocumented and underage migrants are often detained by the state for up to three years while they wait for legal documentation.)

Beltrán first met the boys at a theater workshop for immigrant social integration, where he was invited to speak about his own experiences as a migrant. Bogotá-born, he studied photography in Buenos Aires and lived in Israel and Palestine for two years before moving to Madrid to pursue a Ph.D. in photography. When he arrived, he was also undocumented. “I feel really close to them because we spent a good amount of time talking and sharing our thoughts and experiences,” Beltrán says. He’s currently in Mexico, where he’s working on an ongoing series titled Bravo. 

As he spent more time with the boys, he was in awe of their unique communication style, conveyed through their bodies. They projected an image of macho, muscular men that felt vastly different from his own physique, an observation that inspired Beltrán to name his project Dialect. In the images, he uses the body as a striking metaphor for the journeys and state of limbo experienced by these individuals as they await the start of their new lives.

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Photographs by © Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023 courtesy Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Photographs by © Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023 courtesy Loose Joints

When he initially began photographing the boys, he was struck by their heroic energy. “They were really proud of being migrants and acquired this journey as an important and fundamental experience on their identity,” he says. However, over the past year, he has observed a shift in their self-presentation. They stopped speaking Arabic with one another, adopted a taste for Spanish and French trap music, and sported “fake Gucci or fake Balenciaga.”

Beltrán thought this signaled a desire to be seen as Spanish men rather than as migrants. “When I arrived in Spain, I changed my Colombian accent because, unconsciously, I wanted to integrate into society,” he says. “I didn’t want to be portrayed as the Colombian guy with all the implications a Colombian person has in Spain.”

In addition to the reenactments, which were largely led by the boys in Dialect’s images, Beltrán allowed them to decide how to pose, seeking to capture them the way they want to be seen. As a result, we’re offered unguarded moments and an unfiltered peek into their lives — from bleaching their hair to working out to even the raw intimacy of photographic subject Bilal Siasse smoking a cigarette while holding a mirror for Youssef Elhafidi as he pops a zit.

Beltrán even swapped out his usual film camera with a digital one so he could show them the images as they’re being taken; if they didn’t like them, he would discard them. “I can’t be so naïve and say that I portray them as they wanted to be portrayed a hundred percent, because it’s my way of seeing,” he says. As the photographer, he made decisions about lighting, framing, and composition. And while the boys had significant input on posing, Beltrán selected what would appear in the book. For instance, when the boys wanted to pose with fake guns, he snapped the shot but refused to publish it, as he felt a responsibility to protect them. “I’m not showing this because you don’t know the implication it has of you as migrants or me as a Colombian,” he explained to them.

Regardless, Beltrán accepts that he cannot control how others perceive his images. “The viewer is a complicated concept that, honestly, I don’t think about,” he says. He’s more mindful of the power dynamics at play as a storyteller. “If I were a guy from Spain or Colombia with a certain privilege, the relationship would be different. But at the same time, I have the privilege to be educated and to have a camera,” he says, still noting that he wants to maintain a balance of perspectives.

Looking back, Beltrán acknowledges the thematic elements he’d overlooked. “I was completely unaware of this sacred religiousness on the project,” he says. Perhaps it’s Seville that gives rise to this feeling; with a potent Catholic influence and a rich religious history, the city exudes an atmosphere of deep devotion and reverence. “It influenced me, but also the guys who came from an iconoclastic culture,” he says. One photograph that stands out to Beltrán as a favorite is a spiritual reenactment of their journey to Spain, when Siasse’s friends carried his body after he fainted. The boys together in communal support, holding each other up and bearing one another’s burdens.

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Assembly, Recital (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Photographs by © Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023 courtesy Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Assembly, Recital (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Dialect (2020–23).

© Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023, courtesy of Loose Joints

Photographs by © Felipe Romero Beltrán 2023 courtesy Loose Joints

Beltrán also put together a video installation that underscored the political layer of the project; he included some stills in the book. The video features three of the boys reading the first four pages of Spanish immigration law. “It takes 20 minutes to read, so you can see how they struggle with the actual document that defines them and defines me as a migrant myself,” he says.

He also incorporated stills from his other collaborative project, Instruction. The frames show Siasse performing a choreographed routine alongside choreographer Lucia You, in which he symbolically guides her through movement on the Spanish frontier. “The piece, from my side, is a process of this failure or impossibility to teach someone how to cross the border,” he says. “It also has moments of conversation, because it shows how impossible it is to make a representation of that.”

Dialect is accompanied by six interdisciplinary texts, including contributions from a physicist explaining how boats endure this treacherous journey. Additionally, a choreographer, a philosopher, and an anthropologist specializing in migration offered their perspectives. Finally, two of the featured migrants, Elhafidi and Zakaria Mourachid, contributed their own written pieces.

In Mourachid’s opening note, he writes, “This is the story of a Moroccan guy born in Casablanca, on October 26, 2001. It is a life story that is still in process, but that in the past 21 years has had many changes and has made our guy learn and radically change his way of thinking and seeing the world, a world that is sometimes more unfair and difficult for some. This is a story of overcoming, strength, courage and heart.”

Dialect, by Felipe Romero Beltrán, is published by Loose Joints.

Reframing the Migrant Experience