Seeing What Isn’t There

There’s no I Ching here. No coins. No symbols. No prophecy.

And yet.

This photo isn’t about what’s captured by the lens — it’s about what the mind decides is there. Three indistinct shadows above. Two sets of parallel lines below. That’s all. And yet, somewhere between them, something ancient is conjured.

A trigram. A casting. A flipped coin in mid-air. Logic says: it’s a vent and the shadows of round objects on a backlit surface. But vision isn’t logic. It’s memory, pattern, story — all stitched together before you’re even aware you’re looking.

Photography is often obsessed with truth. With freezing the real. But sometimes the most compelling images are the ones that reveal just how fragile “seeing” actually is. This frame doesn’t document a moment — it invites one. It invites interpretation, projection, construction.

Nothing in this composition was placed with symbolic intent. But the brain insists on reading it that way. Because we are wired to seek meaning in symmetry, message in shape, ritual in rhythm.

You can call it visual pareidolia. Or just an image that slipped past the retina and landed deeper.

And maybe that’s what this photo is about: the quiet power of suggestion. The way a few shadows and lines can evoke centuries of thought, from divination to abstraction — all without ever being what we think they are.