Love ends in loss.
I wish the things I love could last forever, but nothing does.
Buildings decay, and objects grow old and worn.
Feelings dull, and love fades.
People grow older, and eventually everything disappears.
Perhaps it is a terrible kind of selfishness to expect everything outside of me to remain unchanged when I myself am constantly changing.
There are things I have loved that once seemed as though they would always remain beside me.
As time passes, I have begun to see the things I am losing one by one, and the things I will eventually lose.
The deepest longing comes, in the end, from the things I have lost.
Whether love was quiet or overwhelming, however long it lasted, there was a time when, after realizing that love always ends in loss, I wondered how I might erase the hole left inside me and the wounds already carved there.
It did not take long to realize that such a thing would never happen.
Wounds do not disappear. They simply remain where they are.
They are only transformed into something else, each in their own way.
The theme of Connections began with the disappearance of the things I love, and with the memories and emotions of the person left behind to remember them. As I began asking how I might hold on to the things I was losing, Relationships emerged. From there, I shifted my gaze from the past to the present, leading into Encounters, through which I began looking at the world I live in now and the people within it.
The Connections Trilogy did not begin with a question that suddenly appeared one day. Slowly, it became a response to questions I had been feeling and thinking about throughout my life.
Since beginning this work in 2024, I have carried the grief of losing my dog with me for a long time. I still believe traces of that emotion remain inside me. I cannot say with certainty whether I have failed to overcome it, or whether, once I began making this work, I chose not to overcome it completely.
What I do know is that I want to preserve my sadness, the pain that may someday fade, and even the wounds that remain afterward in another form—and to learn to love those traces as well.
I wish the things I love could last forever.
Happily, even if only inside my photographs.
Of course, I know that is impossible.
Still, I want to love the things I love even more.
That is why I pick up a camera.