These images do not, in themselves, depend on explanation. Yet the making of this volume came with certain external demands: there needed to be a text, something that could say what these images are, what was photographed and how it is all organised; there needed to be a structure that could be read. Those demands came from different places, but they all pointed toward the same thing — making the images understandable.

“The photographs remain still, where they are. They existed before this book, before the text. Even before the shutter closed, these images were already there. They might be described as emerging from memory, dreams, hallucinations; from visual images that return again and again; from experiences and sensations that resist classification and remain without order. Certain spaces appear again. Certain faces appear again. Certain kinds of light do too. I recognized them and made photographs of them, in a way that resembles writing, but not storytelling. They were never stories to begin with.

Years later, looking through these photographs again, I find that they still hold that space open, while I have already left the coordinates from which they were made. Time has altered the scale of looking. It has also allowed me to see what I did not notice then, but can no longer ignore now.”