Soft Water brings together photographs made across three trips to Japan in 2019, 2024, and 2026. With each visit, my perspective shifted. Over time, that gaze became more complicated. I became increasingly aware of the distance between admiration and understanding, and of the limitations inherent in translating another place and culture through images. 

A few encounters with bureaucracy, along with a news story about a missing boy, disrupted the idealised surface I had previously moved through. It became impossible to separate beauty from darkness. Photography itself exists through this tension, there is no light without shadow.

Soft Water considers how images participate in contemporary systems of desire, circulation, and repetition, particularly within the context of tourism and social media, where certain locations become endlessly reproduced and consumed. I found myself implicated in this cycle, drawn toward sites already made iconic through photography while simultaneously questioning my presence within them.

This exhibition reflects on the complicated act of looking. How do we respectfully photograph a culture we admire but do not truly know? How do we make images of a place that has already been photographed relentlessly?

Soft Water lingers in quieter registers of attention: atmosphere, detail, gesture, and passing moments of stillness. The works are shaped by affection, discomfort, curiosity, and restraint. They reflect an ongoing negotiation between proximity and distance, and recognition that every act of looking carries both tenderness and intrusion.

I want to drink the soft water, ride a quiet train, walk slowly toward Mt Fuji, pretend I’m in a cult that worships the Tower of the Sun, and fall asleep listening to a river behind softly lit Shoji screens. But I also want to recognise that no place is untouched by grief, contradiction, or darkness.

Soundscape for the exhibition was created by Museum Fatigue https://museumfatigue1.bandcamp.com/album/soft-water