When Photography Stopped Being Enough

For many years, I photographed movement.

Polo matches, horses in acceleration, elegant gestures unfolding in front of spectators. My work was built around timing, precision, and the ability to capture moments that disappeared almost immediately after they happened. Like many photographers working in events and sport, I believed the strength of an image existed in its intensity. The faster the movement, the stronger the photograph seemed to become.

And for a long time, this was enough.

Then the pandemic arrived, and for the first time in years, everything became still. Like many people, I suddenly had time. Time to stop producing constantly and to question what I wanted from photography beyond work itself. During that period, I enrolled in a short course on contemporary photography. It lasted only a few months, but it introduced me to an entirely different relationship with images. We read Roland Barthes, Susan Sontag and other writers who approached photography not simply as representation, but as perception, memory, absence and emotional experience. At first, I considered it only a temporary intellectual detour. When the world reopened, I returned to photographing polo matches and events.

Externally, nothing had changed. Internally, everything had.

The ideas I encountered during those months remained somewhere in the background of my mind. Slowly, almost invisibly, they began to alter the way I looked at photographs, and eventually, the way I looked at the world itself. In October 2025, I entered a longer and more immersive period of study through an independent online school dedicated to contemporary photography, visual theory and perception, where I continue to study today. The process was intentionally slow. We worked through philosophy, contemporary image practices, sequencing, visual language and the relationship between image and meaning. The more time I spent inside this context, the more unstable my previous understanding of photography became. Over time, I became increasingly aware of repetition. Different players, different horses, different tournaments, yet the visual structure often remained similar. The image fulfilled its function, but something inside it no longer felt alive to me.

I realised that what interested me was no longer only the visible event.

What began to fascinate me instead was everything surrounding it. The silence before movement. The emotional residue after it. The atmosphere between bodies. The invisible tension that cannot be fully explained.

I was no longer searching for decisive moments. I was searching for presence.

This shift also transformed the way I looked at horses themselves. In reality, I had never perceived them as subjects of sport alone. Since childhood, horses had existed in my imagination as part of a larger human atmosphere. Through films, literature and memory, I intuitively felt that the relationship between horse and human extended beyond function, competition or performance.

The horse was never simply an animal to photograph.

It was an emotional and psychological presence.

Today, what interests me most is not the horse itself, nor even the human being beside it, but the invisible space existing between them. A form of silent exchange. A transformation that often happens without language and sometimes even without physical contact.

How does proximity to an animal alter a person internally? 
How does presence circulate between living beings?
What remains in a space after movement disappears?

These questions slowly moved my work away from documentation and closer to something more fragile, uncertain and difficult to define.

At the same time, I became increasingly drawn to disappearance, blurred horizons, fragmentation, traces and unstable forms. Contemporary photography gave me permission to stop resolving everything inside the image. I no longer felt the need for photographs to communicate one fixed meaning or to explain themselves immediately.

What mattered was not only what could be seen, but what could be sensed.

I began to understand photography less as a tool for producing beautiful images and more as a way of thinking through perception itself. The camera became less an instrument of control and more a way of observing emotional and psychological states that are difficult to articulate directly.

In many ways, my work now exists somewhere between presence and disappearance.

Between the visible and the emotional. Between the body and its absence. I still photograph horses, but I no longer search only for movement, elegance or spectacle. I search for moments where something becomes psychologically unstable, where the image begins to dissolve into sensation rather than description. Perhaps this transformation did not happen suddenly. Perhaps it had always existed somewhere beneath the surface of my earlier work, waiting for a different visual language to emerge.

What changed was not only the type of images I wanted to make.

What changed was the way I learned to see.