I have been photographing and travelling for a long time. From every journey, I always return with many photographs. Some I keep, some I print, and a few eventually find their way into exhibitions.
Yet recently, I began to realise something simple: a journey does not always end when we return home and put the camera down.
There are experiences that linger longer than I expect. Not merely because of the photographs, but because of the questions that follow. The way I see things shifts slowly, sometimes without me noticing.
A journey, it turns out, does not only move us from one place to another. It also, gradually, shifts the way we look at the world.
Since childhood, I have always enjoyed writing. I wrote about experiences, feelings, and the small details I encountered. From there, quiet conversations with myself would emerge, a gentle way of understanding what I was going through.
When I began photographing and travelling to different places, that desire to write returned.
I wanted a space that would not only hold photographs, but also hold the thoughts that arise along the way.
Sometimes a place does not immediately reveal its meaning. It needs time to be understood.
More often than not, it is only after returning home, when everything has settled, that I begin to see the journey differently.
That is where writing becomes important.
Writing helps me hold on to things that are easily lost: small feelings that appear in a place, questions that arise unexpectedly when seeing something, or a sense of gratitude that arrives unannounced.
If they are not written down, these experiences often pass by unnoticed.
This journal is not an attempt to explain the world. The world is far too vast to be explained simply.
For me, this journal is more like a space to organise the way I understand the world.
The writings here may not always be complete. Not always perfect. Sometimes they are only fragments of thoughts that emerge after a journey.
Yet that is precisely where their honesty lies.
I do not write to appear knowledgeable.
I write so that I do not stop learning how to see.
And perhaps, for me, that is the most honest reason to begin this journal.
