This is the Way

Photography, in a certain sense, resembles a religion.

Its devotees follow pilgrim paths, seeking to retrace the routes of photographic prophets. They visit the same places and events, become devoted to particular brands, genres, schools, and movements. The equipment they carry becomes a kind of sacred artifact.

Yet beneath these outward similarities lies something deeper:

Photography can be experienced as a search for a spiritual path. One’s understanding of Photography grows as one’s vision expands, deepening alongside the mastery of its endlessly evolving language. And at a certain point, the devotee may give themselves entirely to the service of this path.

Of course, one can walk the path of a hermit monk, endlessly reinventing the photographic wheel and discovering everything alone. But perhaps it is more fruitful to follow one’s dharma within a school, a monastery, a community of fellow monk-artists.

In the Hindu tradition, there is the concept of parampara — a lineage through which knowledge is transmitted directly from teacher to student. Such transmission cannot be replaced by self-education through books and treatises: the most essential things are always passed from heart to heart, and cannot be translated into the code of words.

And yet, sometimes the spirit — as photographic vision — descends upon an artist outside any established parampara.

This is how new turning points in the history of photographic language are born: moments of revelation that cannot be predicted in advance. And then the artist becomes the source of a new tradition — a kind of prophet who shifts the boundaries of what is possible and opens a path for others.

And so I, too, seem to be walking my own path, taking my bearings from the coordinates of different traditions, schools, and currents.

Throughout my photographic practice, the language, the techniques, the technologies, the position, and the gaze keep changing. At first glance, even the subjects may seem entirely unrelated. But when I look back at the path as a whole, I can see that it has always been held together by a single photographic thread.

And it is a path with a heart.