When did it begin?

When did I start feeling that the word *photographer* alone was no longer enough to describe what I do?

Of course, I make photographs. I carry a camera, walk, stop, and pay attention to the shifting qualities of light. I spent many years in the darkroom, and I can still recall the excitement of watching an image slowly emerge from the white surface of the paper. In that sense, I have never felt uncomfortable being called a photographer.

Yet the longer I worked, the more strongly I felt that what I was engaging with lay slightly before the photograph itself.

I might set out to photograph a landscape, only to discover that my attention was not truly fixed on the landscape. I might stand before a building without wanting to say anything about the building. Whether it was light falling across a street corner, a shadow on a wall, or a reflection moving across water, what held my attention was rarely the object itself. More often, it was a certain presence arising within the situation.

It was undeniably there.

Yet the moment I tried to name it, it seemed to slip away.

The moment it settled into a recognizable form, it had already become something else.

Because of this, making a photograph felt less like acquiring a subject and more like standing beside something just before it disappeared.

Over time, my understanding of what constitutes a work also began to change. I once thought primarily about the completion of a single image: composition, tonal relationships, density, balance. These things remain important to me. Yet I no longer believe that they alone make a work.

Behind every photograph lies a duration that began long before the shutter was released.

The time spent walking.

The scenes passed by.

The moments left unphotographed.

A glance over the shoulder.

A faint sense of unease that could not be explained.

These accumulate quietly until, at a particular point, they settle into an image. A photograph does not appear out of nowhere. It is often the visible emergence of something that has been unfolding for a long time beyond sight. Once I began to see photography this way, the word *photograph* itself seemed unable to contain the entirety of the experience.

Perhaps that is why I never felt entirely at ease when the work was discussed only in terms of subject matter, technique, or genre. Important as those things may be, they seemed to belong to a later stage of the encounter. My attention kept returning to something earlier—something that could be sensed before it could be fully described.

For that reason, the work never felt complete as a record of an object. Something remained behind the photograph: a question about seeing itself.

Why did I stop there?

Why that particular light?

Why did that moment refuse to leave me?

A work, at least for me, exists not to provide answers but to preserve the place where such questions first arose.

Looking back, what happened in the act of making photographs was usually very simple.

An empty street.

A wall in afternoon light.

Still water after the wind had ceased.

A distant window.

Nothing extraordinary.

Yet there are moments when something entirely ordinary suddenly reveals an unexpected depth. The world does not change, yet something within the encounter shifts. I have spent years walking in search of such moments, trying to leave traces of those encounters in the form of photographs.

Had I been a painter, perhaps I would have chosen a different name. Had I been a sculptor, perhaps another language would have felt more appropriate. But photography became the medium through which I engaged with these experiences, and it is through photography that they continue to unfold.

The phrase *photographic art* is not a professional label.

It is the marker that remained after decades of practice.

Looking back, I find it still standing there, quietly indicating the direction in which the act of making photographs had been leading all along.