Keep Going

I have been taking photographs for three years, and I'm still a beginner. In that time, I have gone from learning the basics to wrestling with the philosophy of photography. I feel a bit lost right now, but the passion is still burning.

It all started with a trip to Hokkaido in 2024 with my Ricoh GR III. I loved the Linksphotography Hokkaido vlog series, and I'd had a strong image of Hokkaido from movies, people and novels since I was a child. After that trip, I carried the GR III every day and studied online until I hit a bottleneck. So I started digging into the history of photography, famous photographers, and photo books. It was a huge sea, and I realized how far my work was from those giants.

That study gave me a whole new way of seeing photography. In 2025, I made a photo book called Eaton Fire. I think it is an unfinished, flawed work. The photography, editing and sequencing all needed work, but I left it as it was.

The story behind it is simple. The Eaton Fire burned about 20 minutes from my old home in Los Angeles, where my parents still live. I was working in the Bay Area then, watching the news every day while they were worried and scared. When the fire was finally contained, I drove down there. It was devastating: only dust and collapsed buildings, despair and helplessness. I took a lot of photos, but not many were good in a technical sense. I walked around in a daze, not knowing how to express what I was seeing.

In the end I still made a small book. It's a record of that experience, a physical object that holds the moment I was there. Whenever I look at it, it takes me back.

Now I shoot every weekend, to build my skills and to figure out what I want to photograph and what feeling I want to put into a photo. For me, photography is a form of expression. It can hold everything, including my view of a place, a thing or a person.

There's one more thing I've found: shooting, editing and publishing put me in a state of flow. It pulled me away from fast internet pop culture and out of nihilism. Photos mostly travel through the internet now, and AI changes the world every day. But I think of my small Eaton Fire book, the one I can hold in my hands. The world is still built on physical things.

I am still working on my next project.