KyuShu Kiosk inside a temple for Black and white community

 

It has been many years since the days when Japan was almost a second home to me, when I would return two or three times each year during my university days. Time has gently blurred the names of the shrines and temples that once welcomed me, but not the feelings they left behind.

They were never places sought out by tour groups or guidebooks. Hidden away in tranquil corners, they retained an authenticity that seemed untouched by the passing decades. Weathered wooden kiosks stood quietly beneath ancient trees, where visitors could rest with a bowl of freshly whisked matcha, listening only to the rustling leaves and the distant ringing of temple bells.

Near the halls of worship were simple offering plaques, each bearing fragments of local folklore, legends, and heartfelt prayers—stories passed from one generation to the next, belonging only to that place. Looking back at these photographs, I realise that while the names of those sacred sanctuaries have faded from memory, their quiet spirit has never left me. They remain among the most treasured journeys of my youth, preserved not by maps, but by the enduring serenity they instilled within me.

Canon 20D

EF 20-70mm f2.8 

Linking Black and White Community

Great wall of China for Black and white community

 

I remember the wall not as a monument, but as an effort
a long, rising insistence of stone against gravity and time.

I had come to it already late in history,
late in my own life even then,
and yet the climb demanded something immediate
breath, legs, a quiet negotiation with each step.

The path was steeper than memory now allows,
each incline a question: how far, how much further?
And still I went,
drawn upward along the spine of something ancient
that refused to lie flat against the earth.

At one turning, I paused
and looked not ahead, but back through the wall itself,
through a broken line of battlements
framing distance like an afterthought.

What I captured was not the wall,
but its echo
stone looking at stone,
time observing itself receding.

Thirty years have thinned the air of that moment,
but the image remains:
a steepness, a silence,
and the quiet astonishment
of having once stood inside history
and looked down.

Canon 20D 

EF 200mm f2.8 L

Linking Black and white community