The word beneath the image is not wrong. It is accurate. And yet when we read genocide we expect Srebrenica. Gaza. Rwanda. The word arrives with an asterisk we never agreed to put there. The chicken exposes that asterisk by fulfilling the definition while violating the expectation.

The Cisterna de les Aigues was built to hold water. Someone decided to fill it with books instead. I went there with a camera. I lasted ten minutes before I stopped photographing the architecture and started watching the people who weren't reading them.

There is a wall in a church in Barceloneta. On that wall, beneath the feet of a crucified Christ, someone has written 'ISRAEL GENOCIDA.' Further down, in the same urgent handwriting of someone leaving a message to God, it says 'Que Paco llegue en 1 División.'

Same wall. Same act of faith in the power of words. Not all of them carry the same weight.

A documentary photographer traces the recurring logic of political violence across continents and decades, and finds the same pattern every time: ordinary men convinced their cruelty was righteousness.

I went to Nepal searching for myself. I found nineteen people who didn't come home. Two days inside Kathmandu's youth uprising, and the moment I understood what a camera is actually for.