#45 · Sep 18–22 · White Dew
The swallows depart
玄鳥去
Tsubame saru · The swallows depart
A search for swallows became a meditation on distance.
The season
玄鳥去 · Tsubame saru
The swallows depart.
The forty-fifth kō still belongs to Hakuro — White Dew, the early threshold of autumn, when the warmth remains but the season has already begun to turn.
In the traditional Japanese calendar, this is the moment when swallows leave.
Their departure rarely announces itself as a single event. There is no fixed hour when the sky suddenly empties. First, the birds gather. Then their number thins. One day, a familiar movement above the fields is simply no longer there.
Migration is a change measured through absence.
The swallows follow routes older than any map, crossing countries and continents through forms of orientation we can describe, but never entirely share.
The landscape stays behind. The birds carry the season elsewhere.
September 18–22 · Hakuro · White Dew
Field note · Upper Bavaria
Ammersee · Raisting · September 2026
I began the day looking for swallows.
The route led along the lakes south-west of Munich, through quiet shorelines, open fields and meadows where any movement in the sky seemed worth following.
The camera was ready. The telephoto lens was waiting.
But the landscape did not offer the image described in the brief.
There was still water at the lake. A stork crossed a meadow. Cattle rested beneath the distant outline of the Alps. Birds appeared — but not in the gathering I had imagined.
Then the road reached Raisting.
Across the fields stood the enormous parabolic antennas of the earth station: machines built to receive and transmit signals across extraordinary distances.
On one of them, small falcons had settled high above the ground.
The scale of the encounter changed everything.
Tiny living bodies occupied a structure designed for communication across continents. Above them was the same open sky through which migratory birds navigate without antennas, coordinates or visible instructions.
The final base photograph was made with a Sigma BF and the Sigma 100–400mm F5–6.3 DG DN OS | Contemporary at 100mm.
The place, the antenna, the light and the falcons belong to the encounter at Raisting.
The gathering swallows became the interpretive layer of the final image — a careful photographic composition that brings the traditional seasonal cue into the landscape I actually found.
It is not a claim that this precise gathering occurred exactly as shown.
It is the visual conclusion of the journey: a real place, a real observation and a seasonal idea brought into one frame.
The search
At the water’s edge, the camera waited for movement that never arrived in the expected form.
Signals in the landscape
Cattle in the meadow, the Alps on the horizon and antennas listening across continents.
Revisited
The original kō speaks simply of swallows departing.
But departure is difficult to photograph.
It is not an object. It is a transition between presence and absence — a movement whose full meaning often becomes visible only after it has happened.
The road trip for Season 45 began as a search for a literal scene: swallows gathering before their journey south.
Instead, it produced a different correspondence.
At Raisting, human technology and animal navigation briefly occupied the same visual world.
The antennas embody our desire to overcome distance through engineering. Migratory birds overcome it through instinct, inherited knowledge and an attentiveness to signals beyond ordinary human perception.
That tension became the photograph.
This is why the image belongs within 72 Seasons Revisited.
I am not recreating Japan in Bavaria. Nor am I pretending that every traditional observation will appear here on command.
I am allowing each kō to direct my attention — and then asking what the landscape in front of me is actually prepared to reveal.
Sometimes the encounter is literal.
We send signals across continents.
The swallows follow signals we cannot see.
Both disappear into the same sky.
45 / 72
Four photographs made.
Sixty-eight observations still ahead.
72 seasons. 72 photographs. One year. One edition.
Notice where you are
What tells you that something is preparing to leave?
Birds gathering on a wire.
A familiar call heard less often.
Movement high above a field.
An empty space where life had been only days before.
Not every departure announces itself.
Some become visible only when we notice what is missing.