What Remains

What Remains is an exploration of relationship — between things, between ourselves and the world, between what we think we know and what quietly exists beyond thought.

Is relationship born from perception? Does it only come alive when we name it, when we draw a line between ‘this’ and ‘that’? Or is relationship the ground itself, the silent field from which all things arise? If all things are already one, if nothing can ever truly stand apart, then what does it mean to speak of relationship at all? And yet, if everything is in relationship — nothing independent, nothing arising of itself — then relationship is the current that carries us, the weave and the weaver, the thread and the cloth, inseparable, unbroken.

Everything shifts. Everything changes. Nothing holds still. Connection itself is not fixed, but fluid — a movement, a breath, a tide that comes and goes, carrying form into form, dissolving boundary, remaking shape. The only constant is change.

And what of perception? Each viewpoint, each glance, is shaped before we even begin — by the code written in our DNA, by the weight of history and culture, by the conditions that raised us and the air we breathe. To see is never neutral. And yet — when those layers are stripped back, when we look with a softness that does not judge or name, when the mind is quiet enough to see without reaching — what remains? What is it that meets us there, without label, without story?

This series of images turns toward that question. It listens for the space between things: the silence between one breath and the next, the stillness that flickers between thoughts, the thin thread of space where one form ends and another begins. Within these intervals, meaning shifts. Absence becomes presence. Distance becomes intimacy. In-betweenness becomes the truest relationship of all.

What Remains is not a statement but an invitation. To pause. To look. To allow the edges to blur. To feel what binds us and what seems to separate us — and perhaps to glimpse that they are not opposites, but two movements of the same wave.

In the end, the images do not ask for understanding so much as attention. They are not answers but openings. Doorways into the quiet. Doorways into the self. And into the world that is not outside us, but within us — breathing, shifting, waiting to be seen.
Back
© Copyright 2025- Tom McGahan Photography
envelopephone-handset linkedin facebook pinterest youtube rss twitter instagram facebook-blank rss-blank linkedin-blank pinterest youtube twitter instagram