My father loves photography, and I grew up with his camera hanging around my neck. In the final weeks of my first university term studying photography, he underwent heart surgery—but only told me afterward, downplaying it as "a minor procedure." It was then I realized he wasn't made of steel.
Shock quickly gave way to a quiet guilt when I heard the news. Though his wound healed, something deeper began to ache within me. I printed hundreds of contact prints from his pre-surgery chest X-rays—each one darkening like the weight of my remorse.
From the used fixer of these prints, I extracted a trace of silver. With it, I crafted a “Five-Colored Stone,” shaped after the patch visible in his post-op X-ray, and inlaid it into the hollow of the image. Though it came too late—more gesture than cure, like a self-consoling meteor—it helped me find, once more, our unique way of connection: gently tending to each other’s hearts through the act of image-making.