Ten years, four months, and twenty-nine days since I moved to Japan, and over that time, many tens of thousands of photographs made. Nearly every day, I aim a lens at something nearby and opening the shutter to project a focused image onto a receiving surface. Sometimes it’s film, though these days it’s mostly digital. Regardless of medium, the outcome is largely the same. A handful of finished photographs trickle out into the world, while most exposures are never seen by anyone but me.

And to be honest, most of the exposures don’t amount to much, anyway. That’s just how photography is, especially if you’re out grabbing shots on the fly as you spot them. Most of them aren’t going to end up working out, and that’s fine. If you slow down and work methodically, you’ll have a higher proportion of keepers, but you also end up taking fewer photographs overall, so the numbers are similar in the end.

Among the photos that don’t usually make it to a finished state, though, are a category of images that assert a quiet importance after the fact. There are the shots that were accidental, and others that were simply forgotten. Others still are those that were made offhand, based more on a gut feeling than anything specifically seen. However they got made, they are usually passed over in the initial edit, when I’m trying to find the images that worked best.

These second-string shots, I’ve come to realize, are often made in a passing attempt to parse reality, to break off small pieces for closer examination at a later time.

These are exploratory pictures. They may be informative individually, but more often seem to have an emergent significance when brought together. I’ve been making these sorts of images since high school, though I didn’t recognize them for what they were back then.

There are periods in which they increase in number. Periods of intense creative development, as well as periods dominated by uncertainty. Unsurprisingly, moving abroad and learning how to live there brings about many such photographs.

There are piles of hard drives and boxes of negatives that consistently overflow onto my desk. I have to wonder what proportion of the images are made up of these parsings, and what might emerge from them if assembled en masse.

This week, in the course of finding and preparing other images for printing and publication, I’ve been inundated with thousands of these photographs.

In a completely unoriginal way, I suppose I came to Japan looking for something. Something vague and amorphous and impossible to nail down. It’s never been clear to me what I’ve been looking for, and at this point I’m not sure that it matters. I came looking for answers, and have found any number of them, but they are seemingly answers to questions that never existed, questions that needn’t be asked.

We seem accepting enough of the idea of unanswerable questions. The existence of a question compels us to seek an answer, but in many cases there’s just no knowing. Ultimately, with the universe being what it is, there’s a lot we have to resign ourselves to not knowing.

Answers that float around independent of questions seem a harder sell. They’re prickly. For whatever reason, a question with no answer is easier to square with than an answer that’s out there, ambling about wholly unconcerned with questions. The latter is a prickly thing, an unbalanced equation that unsettles us.

If a question without an answer is a flashlight beam that peters out in a featureless darkness, an answer without a question is a light that shines back at us, obscuring what sits behind it with its glare.

However you look at it, though, these photographs that have something subtle to say that you only notice later on, they feel like answers to me. They’re answers to questions that I may never learn enough to ask, questions that may not even exist. And looking back at them, stretching back to the very day I stepped off the plane from Shanghai, it seems clear that there is something to learn from them. What that is, I don’t know, and not knowing is OK. In fact, that may be the whole point.