How Batty Was Born — A Story About a Bridge, a Stranger, and a Small Plastic Batman
New York. March 2019. And the Moment Everything Changed.
Every good story has a moment. A specific, unremarkable, entirely ordinary moment that turns out — only later, with the perspective that time provides — to have been the moment. The hinge point. The thing that split the timeline into before and after.
This is the story of Batty's.
It happened on the Brooklyn Bridge, on a cold March morning in 2019, involving a very small Batman, a brand new camera, and a stranger who asked a very simple question.
But let's begin at the beginning. Which is, in this case, considerably further from New York than you might expect.
The Long Way Round
March 2019. The journey to New York began not in Vienna, not in Frankfurt, not in any of the sensible European departure points that exist specifically to transport people to the American east coast in an orderly and direct fashion.
It began with a flight to Ahmedabad, India.
More on that particular adventure — and there is quite a lot to say about it — in a separate article. What matters here is the second leg: from Ahmedabad to Singapore, and then the thing that made the whole multi-day odyssey worthwhile.
Singapore Airlines Flight SQ22. Singapore to Newark. Non-stop.
At the time — October 2018, when it was relaunched after a five-year hiatus — it was the longest commercial flight in the world. An Airbus A350-900ULR, Ultra Long Range, burning a specific low-density fuel blend to cover 17,205 kilometres in approximately seventeen hours and forty-five minutes. The route had been retired in 2013 when fuel economics made it unviable, and resurrected in 2018 when the A350-ULR made it possible again.
Seventeen hours and forty-five minutes in the air. Singapore to New York. The kind of flight that earns its own article — and will get one. For now: it happened. It was extraordinary. And somewhere over the Pacific, with the Fuji X-T3 sitting in the bag in the overhead compartment, the idea of the trip crystallised into something that felt like possibility.
The New Camera
The Fujifilm X-T3 had been released in September 2018. Which meant that by March 2019, it was six months old and still felt genuinely new — the kind of camera you carry around not because you know how to use it yet, but because you are in the process of finding out.
26.1 megapixels. APS-C sensor. Film simulations that make you feel like a serious photographer even when you are lying flat on a bridge in New York wearing a down jacket in the cold. The camera was compact enough to carry everywhere and capable enough to make you want to.
The problem with a new camera is this: to understand what it does well, you need to put something in front of it repeatedly, in different light, at different distances, with different settings. You need a subject that stays still. That doesn't complain about the cold. That will wait while you switch from aperture to shutter priority and back again.
A subject, in other words, like a Funko Pop Batman figure, approximately ten centimetres tall, which had been packed in the camera bag specifically for this purpose.
Brooklyn Bridge. Cold Morning. Small Batman.
New York in March is not the city you see on the postcards. It is grey and determined and considerably windier than advertised, and the Brooklyn Bridge pedestrian walkway at the time of this visit still had remnants of the kind of late-winter cold that sits in the steel cables and refuses to leave until May.
None of which mattered. Because the bridge was beautiful. The perspective of the walkway stretching into the distance, the cables fanning outward in both directions, the towers rising above — it was the kind of composition that a camera demands.
The Batman figure was placed on the wooden planks of the walkway. Low angle. Camera held close to the ground. The goal: to get the figure sharp in the foreground with the bridge receding behind it, sharp enough to demonstrate the lens, shallow enough to separate subject from background.
And then a stranger appeared.
The Stranger With the Camera
He had a camera of his own. He had been watching from a short distance — the way photographers watch each other, with the particular attention of someone who recognises a composition in progress and wants to understand it.
He asked, in the politely direct way that New Yorkers reserve for situations that genuinely interest them, whether he could photograph this.
Not the bridge. Not the skyline. The small Batman figure, sitting on the wooden planks of the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, with a camera lens pointed directly at it.
The answer was yes, of course.
And while the stranger crouched and framed and took his photographs — and someone, somewhere, had the presence of mind to capture this exact moment, which is why the photograph at the top of this article exists — something clicked that had nothing to do with a shutter.
The Idea
The problem with social media is the self. The constant, relentless requirement to be present, visible, identifiable. The face attached to the opinion. The person attached to the place. The human being attached to everything, always, whether they wanted to be or not.
The desire had always been to travel, to write, to share — without the accompanying requirement to make every post a record of a specific person in a specific place doing a specific thing. To be present without being seen. To have a voice without a face.
A figure. A small plastic figure. A character who could go everywhere, be photographed in every restaurant and hotel lobby and airport lounge and mountain pass and beachfront bar. Who could sit on the table at Royal Osha and be placed on the windowsill of a business class seat somewhere over the Pacific. Who had no gender, no age, no biography beyond the places visited and the things experienced.
A character, in short, who needed a name.
Batty
The Batman Funko Pop didn't have a name. It was a prop, a test subject, a piece of plastic with a painted expression of mild vigilante determination.
But Batman felt too borrowed, too corporate, too connected to a franchise that had nothing to do with any of this. What was needed was something that captured the spirit — the slightly nocturnal, quietly observant, travels-by-night quality of the whole project — without directly importing someone else's intellectual property.
Batty.
Not Batman. Not a bat. Not a nickname. Just Batty — a name that is neither masculine nor feminine nor anything in between. A name with no grammatical gender in the conventional sense, because Batty required none. Batty is Batty. The pronoun question is answered by the name itself: there isn't one, because there doesn't need to be.
The figure went into the bag. The camera went into the bag. The bridge remained where it was, doing what bridges do, carrying people from one place to another without particularly caring about what they decide on the way.
What Came After
From New York in March 2019, from the Brooklyn Bridge on a cold morning, from a stranger's question and a realisation that arrived quietly and completely — came everything that followed.
The hotels and the airline reviews. The restaurant tables and the espresso assessments. The airports and the rooftop bars and the mornings on Koh Samui when Bangkok was three hours away and the coffee was taking its time. The ATPL theory and the hours in the logbook. The Lufthansa farewell and the EVA Air pyjamas. The Massaman lamb at Royal Osha and the forty-five minutes at an airport carousel that never came.
All of it: Batty on Tour.
And in every photograph, every story, every hotel room carefully considered and every flight quietly reviewed — the same figure. Small. Plastic. Utterly unbothered by the pressure of visibility.
Batty has been to more places than most people see in a decade. Has eaten better meals than most people eat in a lifetime. Has formed opinions — firm, specific, occasionally inconvenient opinions — about airlines and hotels and coffee and the precise temperature at which an espresso should be extracted.
None of which requires a face.
Just a name. And a bridge. And a stranger who happened to ask the right question at exactly the right moment.
The Photograph
The person lying on the wooden planks of the Brooklyn Bridge, camera pressed close to the ground, is photographing a small figure placed with considerable precision on the walkway.
In the background, a man with a camera is framing the same scene.
This is the moment. Right there, in black and white, on a cold morning in March 2019.
Batty's first photograph. And the last one taken before the world had a name for what it was looking at.
There will be more Batty on Tour stories. There always are. Some of them have already been written. Most of them haven't happened yet.
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