There are things that you cannot capture no matter how hard you try. Time, that flows through like a breeze past your fingertips. People, that you love and rely on. A particular ray of sunlight that hits the edge of a building. The rainbow after a storm. Smiles.

Their fragile, fleeting existence is what makes something all the more precious.

There are bad days when you’re utterly convinced you are abandoned by the world. I think the unseen is what tries to hide from you on bad days. It’s the sunlight peeking through the crack in the door, flowers waving in the wind, loving words from your family. It’s what you try to grasp on to like a lifeline, and that you tell yourself you will be able to see with a set of different eyes the next day you wake up.

If anything, the photos convey the sense of loss as you gain something, the expectation and fear of things leaving you. It’s the pessimist’s dream that comes accompanied with a nightmare, where you know at the second of utter happiness that your tears of joy shall be of sadness tomorrow.

The photos portray the ups and downs in a rollercoaster of emotions, which sometimes, somehow, coexist. It’s the mourning of losses before you lose it. The flowers are blooming, yet I shall leave them in a minute; laughter surrounds me, yet it shall fade into silence. I cannot capture joy, and I cannot see it when it decides to leave me.

The composition is set so that nothing is directly responsive to the viewer, there are elements that bring joy; friends, sunlight, flowers, a scene in a beautiful gallery, yet there is no response from the world to the one looking. The image of friends is taken from the back with a sense of distance from the viewer, which along with the image of sunflowers through the door is adjusted to show a lower angle, as if the viewer’s head is lowered by their emotions. The image of an art gallery is like standing in a crowd where not even the figures in the painting respond to the viewer. An underlying sense of loneliness and helplessness is thus created within an environment that should have been joyful.