The Instance of Once Being Infinite
Wired Sky, 2026
35 mm film print soaked in a salt concentrate
Nothing matters in the midst of all that matters,
because everything that exists today will someday cease. Every image captures an instance that is already disappearing as time continues forward. What remains is a trace of something that was once there, a fragment extracted from the flow of time.
It is a horrifying yet wonderful paradox. Images show something while simultaneously reminding us that the thing itself is no longer present.
In this sense, images become guides to the absent. They attempt to organize and stabilize the fluidity of reality, to take the constant movement of the world and suspend it within a frame. Every photograph confirms that something once existed, but it also marks the irretrievable distance between that moment and the eyes of the present.
The image becomes both evidence and absence. It is proof that something was there, while quietly insisting that it is no longer.
The destruction of reality lies in the attempt to immortalize what is already lost. The camera does not stop time it merely isolates it. What we hold in our hands is not the moment itself but its residue, a surface that gestures toward something that has already slipped away. In trying to preserve reality, we confront the impossibility of doing so.
Perhaps this annihilation of being, is inherently human. We construct images, monuments, stories, and archives in an attempt to push back against disappearance. Yet every act of preservation contains the acknowledgement that something is already gone. The photograph is therefore both a celebration and a mourning. It celebrates that something existed at all, while mourning the impossibility of returning to it.
This raises a different question:
What does it mean to accept what is absent rather than capture what once was?
And in that question I begin to wonder what it means to be an artist.
Does the intention to capture something in an image, in a space, in light reflect something about us as beings? As individuals moving through time? As a collective consciousness seeking refuge in the moments that have passed and the moments that will inevitably pass?
Perhaps we photograph because the present is a difficult entity to swallow. Every moment carries with it the weight of everything we have already lost. People disappear, places change, bodies age, memories fade. The present is not just a point in time but a threshold between what was and what will never be again.
So what do we have to gain?
And does what we gain ever measure up to what we have lost, and what we will inevitably lose?
Perhaps it does not matter. Nothing lasts forever.
And yet I find myself wishing that some things would last, just a little longer.
But maybe the fact that nothing lasts forever is precisely why it matters. Because what we have is this moment, this fragile instant of existence. Even if a moment is insignificant, even if it is forgotten, it still matters because it occurred. It passed through the universe. It existed.
That fleeting existence is our legacy.
Not permanence, but presence.
The energy of a moment in time. The essence of being.
When measured against the scale of the universe, the individual is insignificant. A single life is nothing compared to the vast movement of galaxies or the age of planets. And yet, simultaneously, it is extraordinary. Every choice we make sends vibrations outward, attaching itself to countless unseen threads. Each decision alters a path that branches endlessly, even if every path eventually leads to the same quiet conclusion.
We struggle our way through existence, learning how to live while slowly learning how to disappear.
And maybe that is why I do not want to be remembered.
I do not want monuments or permanence. I only want someone, somewhere, to feel what it was like to stand in my shoes as I once did,
walking along the rim of a garden, orbiting that constellation of weeds and stones for hours, until the sun set and my mother called me inside for dinner.
A moment that was made of many smaller moments.
Fragments of time folding into one another.
But while it lasted, it was infinite.
As I circled those stones, tracing the same quiet orbit again and again, I imagined slipping my small feet into the shoes of the sun
holding the planets within its gravity as they drift through the vastness of galactic space.
To burn with that same quiet certainty.
To hold worlds in motion without ever touching them.
And then, to become something else entirely
a distant star, far away in the darkness, watching as that sun slowly expands and crumbles beneath the weight of its own fire.
Watching as the light stretches thin.
Watching the moment as a witness.
And wondering what sign would show when it began to disappear.
I wonder what red it would glow when it took its final breath.
What color would it paint across the worlds that orbit within its grasp?
What kind of light would remain when the center collapses and something new begins?
I wish I could capture that.
Not with a camera,
but with my soul.
To witness the end.
And to watch it begin again.
Perhaps everything matters within the matter of nothing.
And within that nothingness, every moment of existence
no matter how small
