Before everything began to take shape.
I hadn’t quite found my way yet. Life moved quietly, sometimes aimlessly, surrounded by familiar faces and ordinary days.
This was also when I bought my first film camera for around 200 RMB. I wasn’t thinking about photography as a practice. I was only recording fragments of everyday life, one roll at a time.
Most of the photographs from this period are of friends. Looking back through these rolls now, nearly two-thirds of the frames are filled with people who were once an important part of my life. Time has quietly changed many of those relationships—some friends have drifted away, and some couples in these photographs are no longer together.
These photographs remind me that I wasn’t searching for images then. I was only trying to hold on to moments before I knew they would disappear.