We, Such Fragile Beings

There was an exhibition at PODO Museum in Jeju titled We, Such Fragile Beings. The title hit me straight away. There was something about those four words that I kept turning over in my head for the rest of the trip.

I didn't have an answer to what it was asking. But I kept thinking about it as I walked around the island with my camera.

Looking back through the photographs afterwards, I noticed something. I hadn't been shooting landscapes or landmarks. I'd been drawn, almost without realising it, to things that were on their way out. A tree stripped bare by winter, its branches reaching into a grey sky with nothing left to give. A single persimmon hanging from an empty branch, long after every other fruit had fallen. Grass catching the last light of a sunset, bending in a wind that would outlast it. Waves breaking against volcanic rock that had been there for centuries and would be there long after the waves were gone.

None of it was planned. I just kept pointing my camera at things that felt temporary.

The exhibition's starting point was the Pale Blue Dot. The photograph taken by Voyager 1 from billions of kilometres away, showing Earth as a faint speck in an ocean of darkness. From that distance, everything we fight over, everything we cling to, everything we think will last, becomes almost invisible. And yet here we are, in the middle of it all, taking it very seriously.

I think what drew me to those passing things in Jeju was something like that same feeling. Not sadness exactly. More like a recognition. The persimmon would fall. The light would fade. The season would turn. And somehow, rather than making any of it feel less worth seeing, that made me want to look more carefully.

Maybe that's what fragility actually is. Not weakness. Just the condition of being here, briefly, in a world that keeps moving with or without us. And maybe taking photographs is one way of saying, I noticed this. It was here. So was I.