For a long time, I found conviction in Descartes’ understanding of vision in Dioptrique: he treated seeing as a mechanical process: light refracts, images form, and clarity emerges. He spoke of precision, correction, and sharpness. Yet as we grow older, our eyes begin to tire, and distant things become harder to grasp. What we see, does it truly exist? Perhaps vision has never been purely optical; it also carries memory, sensation, and even imagination.

Once, I accidentally injured my left cornea, and for more than two weeks I could not open my eyes. To ease the pain, I had to keep them closed for most of the time, rendering my glasses useless. Nearsighted as I was, the world turned blurry again, reduced to shifting patches of color and interlacing light and shadow. Even after recovery, that peculiar visual experience lingered in my memory, prompting me to reconsider not only the condition of my eyes, but what seeing truly means.

We often think of vision as something reliable, a clear window through which we connect with the world. Yet during that period, when I leaned close to the mirror trying to see my own eyes, I could never bring them into focus. It was then I realized that seeing could also be blurred and fragile. As Merleau-Ponty wrote, “The enigma derives from the fact that my body simultaneously sees and is seen. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize, in what it sees, the ‘other side’ of its power of looking.” My eyes were both seeing and being seen, yet nothing felt truly in focus.

That blurred vision was not merely an obstacle. It felt like another way, perhaps a more essential way, of sensing the world. Merleau-Ponty reminds us that vision is not just about passively receiving images, but about how we move, how we inhabit space, and how our bodies shape what we perceive. In those moments, seeing was no longer simply looking; it was also feeling, remembering, and imagining what lies beyond the haze.

This led me to think of the old Polaroid camera I keep by my side. As the machine aged, its images grew increasingly unpredictable, until each development felt like a small act of divination. Rather than faithfully reproducing what was in front of it, the camera seemed to interpret the moment on its own terms, capturing the resonance between myself and the person I was photographing. I began inviting friends to join me in this peculiar ritual of chance, and together we created these Polaroid images.

They drift between states of focus and dissolution, nearness and distance, presence and disappearance, red and blue. Again and again, I find myself returning to the question: what does it truly mean to see? And how much of what we perceive is shaped not by our eyes, but by the depths within us: our long-held sensations, memories, and the echoes they leave behind? It could be near, and still far.