A Sense I Can’t Name

Every now and then I take my camera out and go shooting. In those moments, there’s a sensation, an image, that I can’t put into words. It’s something very vague. When I keep shooting, I sometimes capture an image that catches my attention — though whether it becomes a work, I don’t know. Seen objectively, it might be no more than a personal whim, or an experiment.

In my photography, I don’t capture something I like every time. I have to keep shooting, without giving up, until I do. But when I finally do, it makes me happy — it’s one of the things that matters to me.

Sometimes, in the middle of daily life, I come across something that suddenly resonates. Sometimes it’s beautiful light and shadow, sometimes it’s something in the city. In things I usually overlook, something I find compelling suddenly appears. My daily range isn’t very wide — the neighborhood, my walking route, the road from home to the nearest station. Among the things I see every day without a second thought, the things I’ve passed by countless times, there are moments when I feel I want to photograph this. Why I’m drawn to it, I usually can’t explain. It’s purely intuitive, a matter of feeling.

I press the shutter without understanding. Whether I like the photo or not, looking back at it later, I often still can’t make sense of it. And yet I can’t throw it away. Something there stays with me. What that is, why I was drawn to it — I can’t grasp it myself, but every so often I look back through my photos and try to find the reason.

Even so, no answer comes. Maybe that’s exactly why the act of shooting is so compelling, why I can’t stop. And it’s precisely because I don’t understand that I can keep shooting. If I ever understood it all, I think I’d eventually lose interest, and the day would come when I’d stop taking photographs.