Over the course of many years of making photographs, my attention was consistently directed toward the work itself.

I found myself asking what kind of photograph remains in the mind over time, and why certain images continue to stay with us while others quietly fade away. Composition, light, distance, and tonality—these were among the questions to which I devoted much of my energy as a photographer.

Yet as the work continued, another question began to emerge.

It was not a question about quality or completion. Rather, it concerned the conditions under which a particular moment becomes a work at all.

Standing in the same place, most moments simply pass by. Only a few remain as photographs. Technique and experience can explain part of this, but they never seemed to explain everything. I could not escape the feeling that something else was present beneath the process.

A photograph appears before us as a completed image, and it is usually from that image that we begin to speak. We describe what can be seen within the frame and interpret what has already taken form. Gradually, however, my attention began to move elsewhere—not toward what followed the image, but toward what preceded it.

I found myself returning again and again to that interval before an image gathers itself, before meaning settles into form, when the world has not yet converged into a single interpretation.

Looking back, the sensation I had long called nagi always appeared somewhere near this threshold. I was not drawn to stillness itself, nor was I seeking a condition in which nothing happened. What held my attention was a temporary balance in which multiple relationships existed in tension without yet resolving into a fixed form.

As this became clearer, the work itself began to appear differently.

A photograph is a result. Yet by looking only at the result, one cannot reach the question of how it came into being. What interested me was no longer the meaning of the finished image alone, but the conditions that allowed that image to appear.

How does light reveal itself? Why does something that has been present all along suddenly become visible? Why does a moment that had no name gather itself into an image while countless others pass unnoticed?

At first glance, such questions may seem to belong outside photography. Yet it gradually became clear to me that they lie at the heart of photographic experience itself. I was not moving away from photography. Rather, by pursuing photography as far as I could, I found myself moving toward its roots.

The work was not the end of the inquiry. There was always another question waiting beyond it.

Following that question, my vocabulary began to change. I found myself speaking less about works and more about conditions.

A work is always the form something takes after it has appeared.

What drew my attention was the boundary between before and after—the generative field in which something not yet an image begins to become one.

The thought that I would later come to call the Zero Horizon begins here.