There’s a moment when the body stops lying to you and starts telling the truth so hard it breaks something open. This is that moment. Yujin, caught in the gnarled throat of Golden Gate Park’s oldest arguments, those trees that have been twisting toward and away from each other for longer than any of us have been failing at love. She’s not performing. She’s confessing.
I pulled this from the archive the way you pull a splinter from under your fingernail. It had been sitting there for years, buried under newer work, shinier work, safer work. But it kept nagging. Some images do that. They refuse to stay filed away. They knock on the walls of the hard drive at three in the morning and demand to be seen again.
Black and white was the only honest choice. Color would have prettified it, made it digestible, something you’d scroll past on your phone between ads for things you don’t need. No. This needed the brutality (or maybe it’s the honesty?) of monochrome, the way it strips the bark and the skin down to the same raw language. Flesh and wood. Sinew and branch. The blur says: you will not freeze this. You will not own this moment. It is already gone.
LINES dancers carry something the rest of us traded away for desk chairs and certainty. This feral intelligence of the body, this refusal to be merely upright. Yujin folds herself into the tree’s architecture like she was always part of the blueprint, like the park was built around her and the concrete came later, an afterthought, an apology.
I rotated the camera or the world did. Doesn’t matter which. I hit the shutter while everything was still unresolved, still spinning, still dangerously beautiful and refusing to explain itself. I didn’t wait for the moment to settle. I knew it never would.