Essays and criticism by Mariko Takeuchi written between 2017 and 2024 and newly compiled, a sequel to her earlier volume Silence and Image. Through her writing she has kept turning toward the essence of what it means to see and to make. These are words composed quietly in the company of photographs, at times reaching back to encounters with her own images and memories. Some of the essays were first written for students at university graduation exhibitions, addressed to young people aspiring to art, and they illuminate the depth of creative practice. Yet their message reaches far beyond art: in accepting the fundamental frailty of human existence while still choosing to live, to create and to question, her gaze speaks to everyone who finds themselves in a world of disorder. Takeuchi has long worked to convey what has no voice and to ask what it means to see and to imagine the pain of others, and here she draws more closely on personal memory and the body, with reflections on unknowing and on the relation between photography and life itself.