For me, it is like this…

When I am at home, I work hard. Endless hours in the darkroom, creating my prints. But the truly unexpected rarely happens there.

The magic starts the moment I leave the comfort of home and step through a door into something unknown. Suddenly I realize there are always new doors waiting behind it.

That is when life begins to move — when encounters happen, ideas appear, and new stories unfold.

I don’t want to stand in front of a closed door, waiting for it to open. I want to push down the handle, enter, and discover what is on the other side.

It is usually when I am moving, not standing still, that new ideas find me. Those ideas become doors: new places, new people, new opportunities.

Photography keeps me moving.

Can’t wait to see what stories unfold on this journey into Borneo…

…The bottom line for me, in my photography and in my life, is an authentic life, an authentic way of seeing, based in curiosity, fascination, beauty, love, and a search for what I believe is important in life. We think we can control life, but it’s absolutely wrong. All we can do is decide who we want to be and work intentionally to become that person. I want to become the very best version of myself.  I will never be an Irving Penn or an Avedon, and I don’t need to. I want to take the pictures that only I can take. I don’t want to copy their work…

We live in a time where images became almost endless. Most are consumed within seconds and forgotten just as quickly. Everything became faster, louder, brighter, more extreme. And often I feel many images are no longer trying to reveal something real, but simply trying to trigger an immediate reaction. They want attention. They want impact. But very often they leave nothing behind.

This is where I connect deeply with Hildebrand’s distinction between true beauty and kitsch.

Kitsch attempts to force emotional reaction without truth or depth. Genuine beauty, by contrast, does not manipulate. It reveals. It leaves space for silence, ambiguity, and contemplation. This distinction becomes particularly important in artistic practices that seek emotional honesty rather than spectacle. Kitsch pushes sentimentality onto the viewer instead of allowing something deeper to emerge naturally. It often exaggerates, decorates, and over-explains. It wants to impress immediately. But true beauty works differently. It has silence in it. Mystery. Space. It does not scream. It reveals.

The general reputation of artists is often that they’re lazy. I’ve heard it many times. But I believe artists need to be among the hardest working people. If you want to make it as an artist, you have to work relentlessly—failing many times, getting back up, learning, and constantly looking inward to understand what you feel, why you feel it, and how to express it.

Being an artist impacts every level of life. Unlike a “normal” job, you can’t separate your work from who you are. Art eats into your time, your relationships, your sleep, your resources—everything. I often work 12 to 14 hours a day, and still feel it’s never enough. I remember nights standing in the darkroom until three in the morning, exhausted, hungry, but unable to stop because the print wasn’t right yet. Dedication means giving your life over to something most people will never understand. It means sacrificing comfort, stability, and sometimes even people you love. Art demands nothing less.

About the principle of momentum.

I think of it as a giant flywheel.

A flywheel is extremely heavy. In the beginning, it takes enormous effort just to make it move. You push and push, and often it feels as if nothing is happening. It is exhausting. You feel as though the wheel will never complete a turn on its own. Every bit of energy has to come from you. And if you stop pushing, even briefly, the wheel slows down again, forcing you to start almost from the beginning…

The first three days of the AIPAD Photography Show are behind me, and I find myself standing in a moment that is both intense and deeply humbling.

This is the second time that my work is being shown at this prestigious and important art fair in New York. And I feel very clearly what that means. It is not something I take lightly. It is, in a very real sense, a privilege.

The days of Polaroid are pretty much gone... But over the last 10 days, I was working with my Polaroid 809, 804, and 803 films... All 8x10 inches. I replaced the chemicals in the pods, used fresher negative films, and even replaced the receiver sheet... Basically, all that remains original is the frame... I can now make my own Polaroid transfer chemicals... And in those 10 days, I learned a lot about how it works and the transfer process... It's really difficult with color, but with B&W, I am pretty certain I will get it working perfectly...

We don’t do this for glory. We are far away from that.

Creating art has little to do with light, and much to do with shadow — it’s raw, uncertain, exhausting and often frustrating and heartbreaking. It pulls you apart before it lets you breathe.

So why do we do it? Why choose the long, lonely and rough road — the one that blisters the feet and offers no applause?

Because something pushes us. We must!

What we see, what we feel, what we carry — cannot really be spoken. So we try to shape it, to give form to the unsayable.

What actually defines being an artist?

Is it knowing how to paint? To write poems? To use a camera?

Today, it seems almost enough to do something creative in your free time and the title follows. “Artist” has become something we give ourselves.

I went to photograph one famous building in Hong Kong, but I left realizing I no longer saw buildings as objects—they had become subjects with presence, and that curiosity stayed with me for five years.

For fifteen years, my photographs have found their place on the walls of Paris Photo—and for fifteen years, I have never missed a single one. Each time, I walk through those halls with the same anticipation, the same heartbeat of curiosity, wondering how people will respond to my works.