Zero-Horizon Photographic Fine Art A Structural Threshold Between Non-Being and Appearance

What is conventionally called photographic fine art refers to a domain of art expressed through the photographic medium.Within this framework, works and authors are defined through systems of social evaluation and institutional recognition, where human desires for visibility, validation, and circulation are formalized as “art.”Photographic fine art, in this sense, belongs to the interior of the art system and functions as part of a cultural apparatus premised on assessment and distribution.

Zero-Horizon, by contrast, does not originate within this system.It maintains a structural adjacency to modes of thought that have sought points prior to institutionalization, including what has historically been described as Marginal Art.Marginal Art distanced itself from central artistic institutions in order to locate creative activity at the threshold where existence and non-existence appear to touch.Zero-Horizon refers to this orientation, yet extends its scope further—toward the structural horizon that precedes the formation of the world itself.

The “zero” posited by Zero-Horizon does not signify mere nothingness.It denotes an undifferentiated state of equilibrium, prior to the division of being and non-being.This zero is not an affective trace perceived at the moment of disappearance, but a structural threshold in which the world persists before meaning, subjectivity, or form have emerged.

Within this zero-horizon, what arises is neither order nor chaos, neither stillness nor motion, but a minimal structural deviation.The “fluctuation” spoken of here does not describe emotional instability or sensory wavering.It refers instead to the world’s most elementary deviation prior to fixation—a rhythmic displacement through which the world remains open to emergence.

What humans have historically named mono no aware does not belong to this structural layer itself.It appears only afterward, when such structural deviation reaches the subject through the disciplined practice of Shadō, manifesting as an experiential or affective response.In this sense, emotion is not foundational but derivative, arising on the side of the subject.

Accordingly, Zero-Horizon Photographic Fine Art is not a system designed to express “fluctuation” or mono no aware directly.It is the result of a one-time trace, produced when a deviation and response within the world’s pre-phenomenal structure are permitted to appear through the photographic apparatus.

Zero-Horizon Photographic Fine Art is not a technique for presenting expression.It is the placement of a trace—a visible form that the world momentarily allows to surface as a consequence of its own generative structure.The photographer does not function as a resonating subject, but as one who, through Shadō, eliminates excessive intention and prepares the conditions under which the world’s response may emerge.

Photography becomes art here not through intention or evaluation, but through the fact that one has stood at the moment when the world’s generative structure permitted visibility to occur once.

Zero-Horizon Photographic Fine Art thus designates a horizon of art in which the structure of the world—situated between non-being and being—has been left as a single, irreducible trace of generation.