What is this urge to photograph? To notice what others pass, to follow lines and shadows, to stare at things that refuse to be ordinary. Why does framing light become a daily instinct, almost a hunger? Why do we keep searching for beauty as if it were drawn only for us, hidden in plain sight?

I ask myself what the obsession is really about. Not the meaning of life, but the sense of wanting to freeze it. A moment, a feeling, a fragment of light, the flicker of a smile, a reflection in the corner of a window while I wander through London, Berlin, New York. This question has been sitting with me for a while now, like a quiet companion walking behind me.

In Berlin, I met a photographer whose life, experience, and years could have easily overshadowed mine. Yet strangely, we were standing on similar ground, drawn to the same invisible pull. Maybe age doesn’t matter when the eye learns to look inward first.

And then there is Kairos. The idea that something arrives in its own time, the right time. The moment that chooses you, not the other way around. How strange that we both walked into Wim Wenders’ event without knowing each other and walked out connected. Coincidence, or something closer to time revealing itself?

Later in London, a brief exchange with Joel Meyerowitz. Sharp, clear. Almost like the answer did not need decoration. Consciousness. Move through the world awake, seconds before anyone else. Only then does the image mean something.

I asked Wenders about the overflow of content, the endless flood, the noise. His answer was simple: Ignore it. Everything existed before. Create your own thing.

There was nothing else to add.

So are these encounters random? Or do we ask for them before we even know what we’re asking? I wonder if we unconsciously call mentors into our lives, because part of us already knows the questions we need answered.

And yet something else stays with me. The need for dialogue. The long, unbroken conversation that feels almost impossible today. Notifications slice every thought in half, attention scattered, intimacy interrupted. How do we protect these moments from intrusion? Where do we find people who still listen, who respond from a deeper place, who are not already somewhere else in their mind?

Maybe this is why artists sometimes feel lonely. Not because we are alone, but because we are always trying to speak from a place most people no longer visit. We search for the quiet space where thought can breathe—a place without noise, where another mind actually meets ours.

Maybe the photograph we post, or the comment we write, is not about attention at all, but about being heard.

Maybe this is the question I am meant to follow through life, and perhaps you, reading this now, are already part of that conversation.

So let me ask you directly.

Why do you photograph? And are you also trying to hear yourself more.

WHY?

Rhythm of thought and the sound of the sea