Japan

Before I arrived in Japan for the first time, I had already seen it. Films, manga and anime had shaped my image of the country from childhood onward. Japan existed in my imagination before it became a physical experience. Made in late summer 2023 across Tokyo, Kyoto, Fukuoka, Osaka, Hiroshima and Miyajima, this series follows the encounter between a place I had carried with me for a long time and the place I finally experienced. The photographs move between landmarks, slice of life, ritual, commercial spectacle, empty streets and expansive views. They do not attempt to summarise Japan. Instead, they follow the way my attention moved through it, from overwhelming density to sudden quiet, from monumental architecture to small human gestures. People enter the series through brief encounters: workers, passers-by, ceremonies, crowds and solitary figures. A gesture, a pause or a moment of concentration can interrupt the flow of a street and suggest a life continuing beyond the frame. I am interested in these temporary crossings, moments when my path briefly touches lives already in motion. The journey did not replace the Japan I had imagined. It broke it open. What had existed as a distant and coherent image became a place of contradictions, interruptions and encounters that resisted being reduced to a single idea. The photographs remain in that space, between what I expected to find and what refused to fit the image.