Clinical Gaze on Existence: From Cradle to Grave My craving for "recording" began with a landscape of loss. Six months after the Great East Japan Earthquake, while volunteering in the affected area, I looked down at the seaside from a hill. There, I saw only organized streets and the "foundations" of houses lining the ground in silence. The presence of families and warm lives that once existed there pressed upon my heart paradoxically through their physical disappearance, moving me to uncontrollable tears. "Absence is the strongest proof of existence." This primal experience became the core of my photography. For 20 years, I have worked as a nurse, currently witnessing the final curtain of life in a chronic care ward. Conversely, as a photographer for the past five years, I have documented children ranging from two-month-old infants to adolescents, capturing the "explosive radiance of life" heading toward the future. Oscillating daily between the silence of death and the clamor of life, my gaze upon nature remains perpetually "clinical." Currently, my artistic practice is composed of two contrasting series. The first is "Blackened Forest," which depicts forests scarred by history and disaster using absolute black (Black Crush). I define this crushed black not as a lack of information, but as a contemporary "Digital Vanitas"—an acceptance of death and absence. Like the house foundations I saw that day, or the coldness I touch in hospital rooms, what remains here is the "scar tissue" of memory. The second is "Nature Eroticism," documenting the self-contained rituals of plants. Petals wet with rain, curves floating in darkness. These are forms of "Botanical Agape" (unconditional love) offered innocently by nature, yet through the viewer's gaze, they paradoxically acquire a pornographic sensuality. Projected here is the "living flesh" saturated with humidity, mirroring the humans I confront in my portrait work. "Dry Death" and "Wet Life." "Digital Void" and "Botanical Love." These are not opposites, but two sides of the same phenomenon of existence. By using photography to fix the weight of invisible existence into physical matter, I question the view of life and death that modern society is beginning to forget.