Some people watch a film like In the Mood for Love and feel nothing in particular. They admire the colors, the slow movements, the formal beauty, and after two hours they leave with the impression that “nothing really happened.” Others, watching the very same film, are left quietly
shaken, as if something fragile and irreversible had shifted inside them. The images are identical. The experience is not. And this is where a simple but uncomfortable question begins: do we all really need visual experiences in the same way?
I don’t think we do. For some people images are entertainment, a decorative surface placed over reality. For others, images are a form of emotional oxygen. Without them, something essential slowly suffocates. This difference has little to do with education or culture. It runs deeper.
Some people live mainly through language, some through logic, some through action. And then there are those who live through images. For them, vision is not an accessory. It is a primary sense. They do not simply look at the world. They absorb it visually.
This is why a film like In the Mood for Love becomes such a perfect dividing line. Wong Kar-wai does not tell stories in the classical sense. He builds emotional climates. The plot is minimal. What carries the weight of the film is the atmosphere: corridors, colors, repeated gestures, bodies that never quite touch. For those who do not need visual experiences deeply, the film feels empty or slow. For those who do, it is almost unbearable in its beauty. It does not entertain. It wounds.
When someone says that a film is “boring” or “too slow,” very often what they are really saying is: “This does not speak my internal language.” Cinema, like photography, does not give the same thing to everyone. It gives back what each person is capable of receiving. It acts like a mirror more than like a screen. What you feel in front of certain images reveals more about your inner structure than about the images themselves.
The same mechanism applies to cities. Some people walk through places like Tokyo and remain almost indifferent. Others feel their nervous system accelerate, as if the city were a visual amplifier. The street does not change. The eye does. The same reflection on wet asphalt can be
meaningless to one person and unforgettable to another. What changes is not what you see, but how deeply you need to see.
For those who possess this hunger, images are not decoration. They are not a cultural luxury. They are a way to regulate inner tension, to give form to emotions that have no words, to remain connected to reality without having to explain it. Without visual experiences, these people
do not simply get bored. They slowly dry out.
This is why photography, for some, is not a career choice and not even a passion in the ordinary sense. It is closer to a necessity. The camera becomes a filter between the self and an overwhelming world. Through framing, chaos becomes composition. Through light, confusion becomes structure. Photography does not simplify reality. It makes it inhabitable.
This does not mean that those who are not moved by images are lacking something. They simply breathe through other channels. Some breathe through language, some through relationships, some through action. Others breathe through light. These are different perceptual architectures. Problems arise only when one pretends to be universal.
Some people are hungry for success. Some for recognition. Others are hungry for visions. They seek light in darkness, order inside chaos, meaning inside shadows. They collect images the way others collect certainties. Not to escape reality, but to remain inside it.
Images will not save everyone. They are not meant to. But for those who truly need them, a life without visual experiences would be a form of emotional starvation. And that is why they keep looking, keep searching, keep walking into the night with a camera in their hands. Not to escape
the world, but to stay inside it.
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absolutely agree🥰