It actually began with my fascination with contradiction and conflict, long before I thought about floating rocks or how to photograph them. Zen, Conflict and Peace grew out of that fascination. The series also reflects a broader philosophy I've developed over the years, which I call Organic Photography for the Digital Age.

I've always loved theater and storytelling. In drama, conflict is everything. Without it, there's no tension, no characters worth following, and ultimately no story. At some point, I started wondering whether I could apply the same principles to photography. I became interested in bringing together things that seem fundamentally incompatible: gravity and ascension, heaviness and lightness, bondage and freedom, the hardness of stone and the poetry of floating. But there was one important difference. In traditional drama, opposing forces struggle against one another. I wanted mine to coexist peacefully. That's really where the whole idea came from.

I've always thought of myself more as an image creator than a photographer. I'm not particularly interested in reproducing reality. I prefer creating images from nothing, much as a painter composes a canvas or a playwright constructs a scene. The floating rock was simply one of the first ways I found to express what I had been imagining. I sometimes say that I can only see these images in my dreams. Photography gives me a way to bring those dreams into the real world.

Precisely because rocks are heavy! A rock represents gravity, permanence, resistance, and the passage of time. We know instinctively that it belongs to the earth. So when we see one floating effortlessly in space, our minds hesitate for a moment. Something doesn't quite make sense. I love that moment.

What interests me is that the rock hasn't really lost any of its essential qualities. It is still hard, heavy, and solid. In fact, the more conscious we are of its weight, the more extraordinary its apparent weightlessness becomes. I'm not trying to defeat gravity. I'm more interested in imagining what a peaceful relationship with gravity might look like. That's where the idea of Zen comes into my work.

I want to bring opposites together without forcing one to overcome the other: movement and stillness, tension and tranquility, the physical and the spiritual. If you look at my photographs, you won't see fighting, pain, or violence. The contradictions are still there, but somehow they no longer seem to be in conflict. I suppose that's what I'm searching for—a kind of harmony in which things that should be incompatible can exist together, quite naturally.

Making something that seems impossible actually happen in front of an analog camera! Imagining a floating rock is easy enough. Making it appear to float convincingly, without fishing lines, visible supports, green screens, or Photoshop, is another matter entirely.

I had to invent and build specialized equipment and develop my own techniques. It's a process that combines mechanical engineering with physics, optics, and the particular imaging characteristics of large-format cameras. The camera movements available in large-format photography are especially important. By coordinating these movements with carefully designed mechanical arrangements and optical phenomena, including specular reflection and refraction, I can produce effects that would otherwise seem impossible.

Of course, knowing the principles is one thing. Getting everything to work together in practice is quite another! There was a great deal of trial and error, and some ideas that looked perfectly reasonable on paper turned out to be extraordinarily difficult to execute. And occasionally, the work was quite literally painful.

While repairing, modifying, and redesigning antique cameras and developing my specialized equipment, I once seriously injured my left hand. I nearly severed a tendon in my middle finger. It was a nasty injury, and I had to stop working for more than two months. For someone who spends so much time making things with my hands, that was especially frustrating. But strangely enough, the hardest part wasn't always the engineering. It was making sure none of that effort showed in the finished photograph.

I don't want people to look at my work and think about how difficult it must have been to make. I want the image to feel completely effortless. There may be months of experimentation, complicated machinery, failed attempts, and even a little blood behind a floating rock. But in the photograph, all of that disappears.

You see a rock, apparently floating in perfect tranquility. I find that rather amusing, actually. The process of making these photographs can involve a tremendous amount of struggle, while the photographs themselves are all about peace.

I have to confess something: I don't like digital cameras. I really don't. I have a strong aversion to what I perceive as the pixelated look of digital photographs. I'm hopelessly obsessive about image quality. I want every tiny detail rendered as perfectly as possible, and I have an almost sinful fixation on the entire tonal range, from Zone 0 to Zone X. Those subtle transitions from the deepest blacks to the most delicate highlights matter enormously to me.

For my eyes and my particular standards, nothing satisfies me quite like large-format and ultra-large-format film. I call my approach "Organic Photography for the Digital Age." It's not the title of a particular series, but rather the philosophy behind the way I create photographs. For me, photography is a physical and chemical process. Light passes through a lens and exposes a photosensitive material. Even when the finished image appears impossible, I want the illusion to happen there, in front of the camera, rather than afterward on a computer screen.

I'm perfectly happy to spend weeks figuring out how to make a rock appear to float using mechanical devices, optical principles, and a century-old camera. Moving pixels around in Photoshop to achieve the same result simply doesn't interest me. And my difficulties with the digital age don't end with cameras. I also detest social media. I'm absolutely hopeless at it.

This is something I genuinely cannot explain. I can invent complicated mechanical devices, take apart and rebuild antique cameras, and solve optical problems that have kept me awake for nights. But ask me to publish a simple Instagram post, and I'm completely lost! Sometimes I wonder if there's something wrong with my brain.

My son had to set up my social media accounts and website for me. Since then, I've created quite a few new photographs, but I still haven't managed to upload them or update anything online. Think about it: I can make a rock float in front of a 95-year-old camera, but I can't make a photograph appear on Instagram! I suppose I'm simply much happier making things than posting things. And that probably explains my philosophy better than any technical definition could.

Organic Photography for the Digital Age is my personal commitment to making images through light, optics, chemistry, and physical craftsmanship. It's the way I choose to create, whether I'm working on Zen, Conflict and Peace or whatever comes next.

It actually began with my fascination with contradiction and conflict, long before I thought about floating rocks or how to photograph them. Zen, Conflict and Peace grew out of that fascination. The series also reflects a broader philosophy I've developed over the years, which I call Organic Photography for the Digital Age.

That's an interesting question, because I think there's a difference between finishing a group of photographs and exhausting an artistic idea. My first major body of work, Zen, Conflict and Peace, was conceived as twenty black-and-white photographs exploring different kinds of contradiction: weight and weightlessness, restraint and freedom, movement and stillness.

I never wanted to make twenty variations of the same trick. Each photograph needed to say something a little different. Otherwise, what would be the point? Because of my interest in theater, I tend to think of a photographic series almost like a play. Each image is a scene. It has to work on its own, but it also needs to contribute something to the whole. I know it's time to stop when I find myself repeating an idea rather than discovering something new.

Inventing another clever illusion isn't enough. The image has to move the work forward in some way, whether emotionally, visually, or philosophically. But have I finished exploring contradiction and harmony? Certainly not! I suspect those subjects will keep me occupied for quite a long time.

It means a great deal to me, particularly because I came to photography relatively late. I didn't discover photography until I was thirty, and I'm entirely self-taught. I've spent decades studying photographic art, experimenting with historical processes, and collecting and rebuilding cameras, mostly because I was fascinated by them and couldn't stop.

I only began my professional career as a fine-art photographer in 2025. So to receive the International Photographer of the Year title, along with the Photographer of the Year and People's Vote honors, is something I never really anticipated. I'm especially touched by the People's Vote recognition. My photographs are rather quiet. They don't have an obvious narrative, and they don't necessarily reveal their meaning immediately. I think they ask the viewer to spend a little time with them. To know that people have connected with these images, including people I've never met and who may come from very different backgrounds, is deeply gratifying.

As for what comes next, I still have far more ideas than I know what to do with. I'm continuing to explore large-format and ultra-large-format photography, historical photographic processes, and the possibilities of designing and building my own equipment. There are still so many things I want to try. And, of course, I remain fascinated by contradictions—especially the possibility of expressing something philosophical or emotional through a photograph without having to explain it. 

I've never been particularly interested in following trends, and starting my professional career later in life may actually have given me a certain freedom in that respect. I simply want to keep making the images that exist in my imagination, however difficult they may be to bring into the world. If someone looks at one of my photographs, wonders for a moment how it could possibly exist, and then forgets that question long enough to experience a little peace, I'll be very happy. After all, I'm not trying to photograph conflict. I'm trying to create peace from it.