S·he stayed with me for a long time before it became a project. I kept coming back to the same thought. What if history had left room for different possibilities? Perhaps through different opportunities, even if many of the events themselves remained the same.

The women came first. Long before I reached for the camera, I wrote biographies for each of them. I imagined their childhoods, the people they loved, the disappointments they carried, the moments that quietly changed them. By the time we met in the studio, they already felt real to me. The photographs were simply another way of getting to know them.

That was important because I never wanted anyone to perform an idea. I wanted them to understand a person. Once that happened, the rest had a habit of falling into place. The clothes stopped being costumes. The light stopped being lighting. Even the smallest gestures seemed to belong to someone rather than something.

The three women found their own way into the work. The Explorer almost demanded structure. Every decision seemed to open the door to another. The Luminarie was different. Each new version felt quieter than the last, as if the work was asking me to let go rather than add more. By the time I reached the Catalyst, I realised I had stopped looking for complexity altogether. I was simply wondering how little was needed before only the person remained.

The materials came from much the same place. Lapis, copper, palladium, Awagami paper. I was drawn to things that don't stay exactly as they are, that respond to time and light in their own way. Some of them never appear on the front of the work. They remain hidden on the reverse because it felt honest that not everything shaping an image should reveal itself immediately.

Looking back now, I don't think I was ever trying to reconstruct history. If anything, I was trying to understand why I found myself searching for these women in the first place. They probably belong as much to memory as they do to imagination. Or perhaps to hope. I honestly don't know where one ends and the other begins.

What I do know is that I keep looking for the same qualities. Curiosity. Kindness. Quiet confidence. Strength that doesn't need to announce itself. Maybe they come from people I knew. Maybe from stories. Maybe from the way I remember childhood. It hardly matters anymore. Photography simply became the way I searched for them.

Perhaps that is why these portraits have always felt strangely personal. They aren't photographs of me, yet they say more about the way I see the world than any self-portrait ever could.