The Question Behind the Image
For a long time, I believed I was photographing to hold onto fleeting moments. That, somehow, this act —lifting a small box with a lens— was my way of pushing back against time.
I think I now understand why that felt true. As Viktor Frankl suggests, the awareness that our time will end has a way of giving weight to how we live it.
But lately, that explanation has begun to feel incomplete.
I first felt that weight at sixteen.
I was sitting alone one cool September afternoon along the Hudson River waterfront in Peekskill, New York. The air had that early autumn stillness. And somewhere in that quiet, a thought surfaced that I couldn’t shake:
If everything eventually comes to an end… what is all this for?
I don’t claim to have an answer. The question has stayed with me for decades —through years of prayer and belief, and later, through philosophy and science, each offering a different way of trying to understand the same mystery.
But what does this have to do with why I photograph?
I’ve always been driven by a kind of curiosity that doesn’t settle easily. The more I think I understand, the more I notice how much escapes me.
And somewhere in that tension, something quieter began to surface: the texture of experience itself —the way a moment feels before I can explain it.
That’s when something began to shift.
I’m not trying to hold onto time anymore. It’s more that I’m responding to how it feels as it passes.
I’m learning to stand in front of the world long enough for something to reveal itself.
So the images I share here don’t feel like a collection of moments to me. They’re closer to traces of what it felt like to be there.
The photograph feels less like an answer and more like a question I asked without words.
Am I taking photos to feel? No. I take them because I don’t yet understand what I feel.
Sometimes the images sit untouched for months. Not out of avoidance—something in me just hasn’t caught up yet. When I return to them, I’m left with another question:
What am I really seeing? The world, or traces of my inner life, reflected back at me?
As Ruth Ozeki writes in A Tale for the Time Being, every reader reads themselves.
Photography feels similar to me. The image holds something in place, but what it means never quite settles.
If there’s any truth in it, it doesn’t come from me alone. It shows up somewhere between what I saw and what you bring to it.