Toward the Clearing

We were driving through the back roads of Biei when the landscape shifted without warning. Turning off onto a dirt track, the road rose gently and narrowed, and suddenly we entered a tunnel formed by tall, dense trees. The light dropped away. The world became enclosed, hushed, and unfamiliar. For a moment, it felt as if the outside world had been left behind.

As the car climbed, the tunnel began to open. At the crest of the rise, a single tree appeared, distant and still, standing alone at the edge of the light. It felt less like arriving somewhere than briefly glimpsing something, a scene revealed just long enough to register, like the outline of a destination you are not quite ready to reach.

There was no time to settle. Another car approached from behind, urging us on. We stepped out only long enough to make a single frame. The encounter was sudden, fleeting, and oddly intimate, like waking from a dream before it has fully formed.

The image itself resists certainty. Trees fold inward from both sides, their branches angling toward the centre. The road, dark and wet, carries thin traces of reflected light toward the distant figure. What lies beyond the frame remains unseen. The landscape is not presented in full, but suggested, leaving space for the viewer to complete the journey.

Seen through Vertique, the composition becomes a passage rather than a place. It draws the eye through shadow and narrowing space toward a point of light and stillness. Part landscape, part abstraction, it reflects moments that many recognise in their own lives. Times when the way forward is unclear, yet something steady waits beyond. Not an answer, but a presence, briefly revealed before the journey continues out of sight.