Rainer Maria Rilke’s “The Duino Elegies”
“For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror,
which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains
to annihilate us.”
Silhouettes of the past
Step quietly into "Silhouettes of the Past," a collection where presence and memory are drawn not in full light, but in the soft outlines cast by all we choose to leave undefined. These images linger at the boundary of then and now, where our forms become blurred—alive less as portraits than as echoes of who we once were but can never fully reclaim. Here, the self is glimpsed as a shifting shadow: neither sharply fixed in yesterday nor clearly seen in the freshness of today, but caught in that tender space where remembering and forgetting intermingle.
Like a silhouette, the past is never seen whole: shaped by contrast, revealed only in fractured glimpses—where light touches memory and shadow veils what we forget. Half a smile, half a figure in gold or darkness, both linger just beyond reach: memory refuses full surrender, drifting between happiness and loss, sharply outlined yet dissolving at the edges. Twilight drapes these moments, blurring certainty into hush—an echo pulsing with longing, half-lost and half-lit. What fades becomes the lantern we carry, its dim glow casting contours over every step forward, shaping not what we see, but all we still dare to feel.
HALF CAST
Thresholds the light cannot cross
—we sense how beauty and fear, awe and endurance, quietly touch in every silhouette left behind.
Each photograph invites you not merely to look, but to feel the silent negotiation between what remains and what slips away; to ask what it means to carry the contours of the past forward, half-seen, into the ever-unfolding present.¨
She drifts at the periphery, figure unmoored, dusk deepening against her quiet radiance. Beauty gathers and then slips through shadow, as if she were painted on the thinning air—her very being a faint bright pulse tangled at the threshold, held back, soft and steadfast, by the darkness history has drawn.
Light haloes around her—brief, unpromised—etching steadfastness onto her posture, the line of her shoulders a silent anthem. In the wide hush you sense her waiting: the hush of breath before a crowd, the hush that once pressed her to the sidelines. For a flickering instant, all that’s overlooked is illuminated, and she wears the moment with a solemn grace, dignified and unclaimed.
Thing’s gold unravels her boundaries—feet nearly lost in a pale shimmer, ambition ghosting into atmosphere. Her stride dissolves into the fading frame, the ball a quiet witness at her back: triumph rendered ephemeral, visibility as fleeting as the light—each step a question of how fully she is allowed to appear, how easily she is written back into shadow.
For what insists on
being seen
Gold gathers at her edges—soft, uncertain—each step trailing luminescence as though the world itself hesitates to decide: will she vanish or blaze through?
The shimmer she leaves behind is not only what fades, but what quietly insists, illuminating a path the dusk cannot wholly claim; even as shadow presses close, a hush of yellow endures—a persistent, spectral glow that marks not where she ends, but where the next possibility begins.
Make it stand out.
