Before & After
Cover image
Before & After marks a quiet reckoning within my broader research into the metaphysical potential of photography—how the image not only reflects what is seen, but gestures toward what is felt, remembered or imagined. It emerges from my doctoral inquiry, Behold – The Abiding Spirit in Photography, which considers the photograph as a threshold, a residual presence, a murmur of something beyond.
In these works, photography returns to its earliest tension—between documentation and mysticism. Through spectral layering, veiled light and the deliberate ambiguity of time and space, the images do not disclose so much as they invite. They draw the viewer into an unsettled space where the image operates as both trace and apparition, presence and afterimage. They ask not only what is visible, but what emanates from vision.
The title Before & After speaks to a drift between states—of seeing and forgetting, presence and loss, memory and oversight. Each image becomes a still interval, a contemplative pause between one moment and another. A register not of events, but impressions.
This exhibition also signals a turning point. A moving forward in creative research toward expanding technologies that further displace the idea of photographic certainty—most notably, Quantum Ghost Imaging and the evolving entanglements of artificial intelligence in image culture. These emerging territories continue to echo the central concern of this work: that photography, at its most profound, is not an act of capture, but an act that triggers a certain quality of attention.
Before & After is both a culmination and an overture—marking what has been and what is yet to be seen.
This work is about to be featured in the Pingyao International Photography Festival in September 2025
