Portraits by Nao Nakai that ask about existence and knots. The project began when her grandmother fell ill with Alzheimer's: the memory impairment clogs the flow of time, the present loses its expansion into past and future and converges into a minimal point, the sense of identity hardly remains and exists only in random moments, and her grandmother completely lost the images cultivated over a lifetime. Portraits are usually a reflection of the images photographers hold of their subjects or the purified self-images of the subjects, and neither worked here; the questions of what a portrait can capture of a person and what it means for a person to exist became one. Out of many pictures, one captured a presence that could only be called her grandmother and launched the whole project: portraits from which subjective and objective meanings are peeled away. Her gaze then extended to things, plants, animals, forests, cities and scenes, the unchanging within the changing, and to a world made of nameless relations, knots in the fabric of time, as the back of an embroidery shows what the front hides, which gives the book its title.