There are moments, after years of working with photography, when I find myself uncertain about what it is that I have truly been photographing.

I am not speaking of technique or subject matter. I can explain the kinds of images I am drawn to and the forms of expression I pursue. Yet when I ask why I am repeatedly drawn toward the same direction, the same atmosphere, and the same elusive presence, language begins to lose its certainty.

In fact, I had been using the word nagi for this sensation since quite early in my practice.

It was neither a theory nor a conviction. It was simply the only word I could find for a quiet tension that would arise at the moment of exposure—an interval in which the world seemed suspended just before it gathered itself into an image. At the time, I did not yet understand the full weight that the word would eventually carry.

As the years passed, traces of nagi appeared with increasing frequency. Places changed. Seasons changed. The subjects within the frame changed. Yet beneath those differences, a strangely purified consistency remained. It was no longer something I could dismiss as coincidence. It felt like a fundamental layer through which I passed each time I encountered the world.

The photographs were successful enough. They became works, entered exhibitions, and found their place within larger structures. Yet the underlying "why" resisted being named.

Was I searching for something? Or was I being led by something?

Neither time nor production dissolved the question. Completing one series only carried it into the next. If anything, the contour of what I called nagi became sharper, while the sense that some underlying necessity existed behind it grew more difficult to ignore.

Looking back now, I can see unmistakable traces in the early work.
Things I could not explain at the time.
Sensations for which I possessed no language.
Directions that would only much later become articulate, already present in the images in an undeveloped form.

What I am doing when I revisit those photographs is not an act of nostalgia. I am not recovering the past; I am rereading it. I am looking for what was already there, even if it was invisible to me then.

When I first began, I believed I was trying to "create" works. That remains true. Yet decades of practice have revealed another aspect of the medium. Photography is not merely a means of giving form to what one already understands. It is also a vessel capable of carrying questions that have not yet found their language—interests whose significance remains uncertain even to the photographer.

In my case, this was never a passing curiosity. It remained quietly present behind the work, appearing again and again while resisting easy interpretation. It was a "condition" that made the work possible.

I now feel that I am standing somewhere in the middle of a path toward a new logic. What I once experienced simply as nagi has begun to connect with a broader theoretical structure. My attention has shifted from the works themselves toward the generative conditions that allow them to exist. This inquiry no longer seeks an answer outside photography. It arises, inevitably, from within the practice itself.