A Photo Was Not Taken for the Sake of Looking

July 04, 2025

Once the curious people had left, I stood there alone for a long time. Honestly, I wasn't particularly interested in seeing the three little foxes. It was the scene itself—everything about that moment and place—that held me there.

Could this scene be captured in a photograph? In the past, I would have regretted not bringing my camera or the right lens. But now, I just wanted to remain in that moment.

After over twenty years of photographing, I have come to realize that the most beautiful moments are always the ones that cannot be recorded by a camera. I have captured many moments from the ever-flowing river of time. However, time flows, and each moment is replaced by the next. Photography, too, is a manifestation of humanity’s desire to preserve, to make things eternal—much like the effort people put into building castles to defy time. It is a futile struggle against time, rather than embracing its flow.


At that particular moment, I let myself stay there, lingering in it for a long time without trying to capture it.

When you throw yourself into the moment, you come back empty-handed. Creating art is already a life lived with your feet off the ground, and now, by giving up the desire to capture it, you return with nothing but memory—no photograph to prove it, and yet your soul is full. And yet, no one else can ever quite understand the fullness of that moment. It is a lonely, yet fulfilling experience.

You still want to share it, to let everyone feel such fullness. But how can you convey that moment to others? A moment that cannot be captured by a camera? How could equipment compare to the human eye and heart? It's no longer about resignation but about learning to let go of the camera and follow the flow.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry realized that "The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or touched, they are felt with the heart." So he wrote the story of The Little Prince.

I saw foxes, three of them, newly born. In the early afternoon, they played under the pink azalea tree. Tired from playing, their tiny bodies lay down under the pink azalea tree, curling up with their heads tucked into their tails, and fell asleep. The afternoon sunlight filtered through the deep green forest, dappling the azalea flowers. The almost transparent pale pink petals swayed gently in the breeze, shimmering with an angelic soft glow. Like a silent lullaby, they accompanied the three little beings to sleep. The breeze blew off the petals, which gently landed on the foxes' fur. In their dreams, the foxes twitched their ears and continued to slumber amid the chirping of birds and insects.

Everything was just right: the temperature perfectly mild, the wind just enough to stir the air, the sunlight warm but gentle. Only the birds sang freely among the cedar trees, then took a leap and flew away, causing the branches to bounce gently and scatter a handful of dust-like pollen. Following the direction of the birds, and against the sunlight, you could see hundreds of tiny insects busily swirling in the woods. The blue sky quietly provided a backdrop, and the white clouds moved silently and leisurely among the tall cedar trees. The ferns on the ground slowly unfurled their curled fronds at an imperceptible pace, as if, like me, they were curiously peeking at the three sleeping foxes in the afternoon.

That afternoon, I was immersed in the harmony of everything around me: flowers, birds, grass, insects, and foxes, the air and the sunlight, the clouds and wind. And yet I felt like an out-of-place intruder, an awkward presence. Every color I wore seemed unnatural and jarring. The blue hoodie was too conspicuous, the orange backpack too glaring. Perhaps only the black pants could blend into the deepest shadows of the forest.

In this nearly perfect scene, I wanted to disappear, leaving only my consciousness hovering around. My presence was too abrupt there. But if “I” weren’t there, would all these—every flower, every blade of grass, every tiny insect, every drifting speck of pollen—still exist just the same?

I am a consciousness housed in a body, a vast consciousness that encompasses everything, like the eye behind the camera lens, perceiving it all. But beyond this conscious lens, or if this conscious lens were closed, do the sleeping baby foxes in the afternoon truly exist?

Their small, light brown bodies rise and fall gently, as if caressed by the breeze.

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