The world offers itself to us in layers, in masks, in forms that shift depending on how we look. Shapes repeat themselves, echo across distances. A road becomes geometry. A shadow suggests a presence that isn’t there. Forms speak to each other across contexts, revealing that beneath the surface of distinct things lies a deeper vocabulary of pattern and resonance. The world is in constant conversation with itself. These moments of recognition surprise me, shift something inside. When one thing suddenly reveals itself as another, ‘I am transported—into wonder, into unease, into a particular mood we can’t quite name. The surprise isn’t just intellectual; it’s felt, emotional, a quickening of attention that changes how we inhabit the moment.
This is the photographer’s territory: the space between what something is and what it seems to be. To photograph is to acknowledge that seeing is never simple, never complete. It requires patience—a willingness to wait, to observe, to let the disguise reveal itself or deepen further. To notice when one thing whispers the name of another. The camera doesn’t just capture; it questions. What are you, really? A tree or a figure? Landscape or abstraction? And what do you remind me of? The answer is often: both. Neither. Something else entirely when the light changes, when memory intervenes, when one form calls to another across the frame.
There’s a kind of play in this—a collaboration between photographer and world. Reality hides, yes, but it also wants to be seen. It offers clues, suggestions, invitations to look closer, to look again, to see the connections between seemingly unrelated things.
In the end, perhaps nothing shows itself clearly because clarity itself is an illusion. Things are always becoming, always between states, always echoing other things, always offering more than one truth. The photographer’s task is not to force revelation but to witness this beautiful ambiguity—to see what is hidden in plain sight, to notice when the world rhymes with itself, and to let it remain mysterious even as it’s captured.