Qualia
It took me time to understand why I photograph. For a while, I thought it came from a stubborn need to hold on to moments—to push back against how quickly memory fades. Maybe that's part of it. But it's not the center.

Thinking about consciousness, and what's often called qualia—the raw "what it feels like" of experience—shifted something for me. I began to realize that photography was more than merely attempting to preserve memory. It was me responding to experience.

What am I actually doing when I make a photograph? Am I capturing time? Or am I trying to give shape to what it felt like to experience and be alive in a particular moment?

If that's true, then a photograph isn't proof of what was there. It's evidence that I was there to feel it.

My images aren't a collection of moments. They're moments that refused to pass without leaving a mark on me.

Because of that, I'm no longer someone who understands a moment and then records it. I step into the unknown, using the act itself to find out what's there. It's less documentation, more inquiry—turning toward experience as it unfolds. At home, with family, or walking through the city, something pulls at me before I can explain why.

Only later, looking back, does it begin to surface.

The photograph becomes less of an answer and more of a question I asked without words.

I'm not just reacting to what's "out there." I'm reacting to how reality appears to me—filtered through memory, mood, history, and things I haven't fully faced. So when I look at my images, what am I really seeing? The world? Or traces of my inner life, scattered across walls, faces, and light?

Am I taking photos to feel?

No. I take them because I don't yet understand what I feel.

That might be why images sit untouched for months. I'm not avoiding them. I'm waiting—whether I know it or not—for something in me to catch up to what was already there.

The camera may be a machine, more computer than anything else. But it doesn't feel. I do.

So maybe I'm not making photographs as much as I'm building a kind of mirror I can't look into directly.

Ruth Ozeki writes in A Tale for the Time Being, "Every reader, while reading, is the reader of his own self." Photography works the same way. The camera frames something, but meaning isn't fixed. It forms in the encounter.

Truth, then, isn't something I hand to you.

It's something that happens—somewhere between what I saw and what you feel.