For me, losing my great mentor and dear friend, Jean-Jacques Naudet, is the deepest sorrow I have ever known. I only just received this devastating news—having discovered it when I saw my portfolio featured in "The Eye of Photography", yet noticed that Jean-Jacques Naudet’s contact email was missing. At this moment, I am left speechless. The entire world has lost a true titan of the photographic realm. It was he who, just ten years ago, encouraged me to launch my own personal website; and as recently as last October, I had written to him.
I simply wish to express my sincere gratitude to you for the assistance you have provided over the past decade—guidance that has charted a clear course for my street photography. It was you who set me on the right path and suggested that I establish my own website; today, I deeply realize just how pivotal that step has been for my career in street photography. You are the wind beneath my wings; it is precisely because of your support that I have been able to take flight.
I have found that the photographic styles of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau resonate perfectly with my own nature. I intend to follow in their footsteps, engaging in pure street photography to capture those fleeting moments—without staging, retouching, or the use of AI.
“What I write here is a description of what I have come to understand about photography, from photographing and from looking at photographs. A work of art is that thing whose form and content are organic to the tools and materials that made it. Still photography is a chemical, mechanical process. Literal description or the illusion of literal description, is what the tools and materials of still photography do better than any other graphic medium. A still photograph is the illusion of a literal description of how a camera saw a piece of time and space. Understanding this, one can postulate the following theorem: Anything and all things are photographable. A photograph can only look like how the camera saw what was photographed. Or, how the camera saw the piece of time and space is responsible for how the photograph looks. Therefore, a photograph can look any way. Or, there’s no way a photograph has to look (beyond being an illusion of a literal description). Or, there are no external or abstract or preconceived rules of design that can apply to still photographs. I like to think of photographing as a two-way act of respect. Respect for the medium, by letting it do what it does best, describe. And respect for the subject, by describing as it is. A photograph must be responsible to both.”