Selected Graduation Works from the Department of Photography,
Faculty of Arts, Tokyo Polytechnic University Recommend Exhibition 2026

I have made it a habit not to step on tactile paving blocks, which are installed in public spaces to guide people with visual impairments. Yet I had never tried to know the people who exist beyond that action.
Through dialogue, I encountered individuals whose rich personalities cannot be reduced to the single category of "people with visual impairments."
From three fragments - appearance, personal belongings, and remembered scenes - I attempted to trace the contours of each person.
I hope this work may become an opportunity to reflect on the individuals who stand beyond the tactile paving blocks.

The Tama River draws together people with a wide range of cultures and values. Through chance encounters - like the flip of a coin - I peer through the viewfinder into "the Tama River as seen by others." This experience reminds me of the sensation I had as a child, searching for insects and discovering the world through those small, unexpected finds.

I am interested in the theme of boundaries, particularly the invisible divisions that arise between foreign communities living in Japan and the surrounding society.
As people, cultures, nature, and social structures intersect, I seek to capture the subtle sensations that arise from these encounters - listening to the atmosphere of the land and the voices it holds - and to depict boundaries that remain soft and permeable.

By shaping my accumulated perspectives and experiences into a single body of work, I seek to convey the appeal of Niijima as I have experienced it - the enduring power of its natural environment and the irreplaceable moments of the people who call the island home.

This is a story of an ending and a beginning.
When I once prepared myself for death, I instinctively thought, I don't want to die yet. That meant there were still things left undone. When I was crying because I could not go to school, I felt there were feelings I wanted to deliver - to a lonely child like myself. That is why I did not want it to end yet.
This was the beginning of everything. My soul cries, struggles, laughs, and loves - again and again. Each time, it marks a beginning. Sadness, too, and farewell - are always beginnings.

No matter where I take photographs, I can only bring back fragments of a scene or something anonymous. I came to feel that the experience itself - the breath of the moment, what I was thinking at the time, and the process of traveling across distance - possesses a far greater scale and complexity. In order to slowly, yet surely, grasp traces of small events and encounters from daily life and travel, I mailed my pinhole camera as a "letter." In response to this back-and-forth of mailing and movement, I also photographed images that themselves become postcards.

From February 2021, I was active for four years as an underground idol in Japan under the name "NinomiyaAaa." Through live performances, meet-and-greet events, and social media, I built close relationships with my fans, while always existing within a sense of intimacy accompanied by an ambiguous distance. This work consists of portraits taken head-on of the fans who supported and shaped me during that time.
Through photography, I revisit the distance between idol and fan - something I was unable to fully confront while I was active - and present this work as a testament to the four years I spent living as "NinomiyaAaa."

When I was in high school, at a time when "my world" was still extremely small, I was captivated by the glow of dawn and the colors of sunset visible along my daily route to school. Unlike the moon, the sun never wanes. I was drawn to the way it sinks into the horizon, overlaps with clouds, and transforms the sky from moment to moment - to the reflections on the water's surface and the cityscape dyed in shifting colors.

Back then, as I would stop my bicycle and take photographs with my smartphone, I carried a quiet longing: someday, I want to hold a SLR camera, travel farther, and photograph what lies beyond.

Now, after four years of studying photography, I have shaped that long-held desire into a tangible form.

I have been drawn to moments of unease and eeriness that suddenly surface in everyday life, and I have followed the sense that, in those moments, an entrance to another world appears. I perceive these places as presences that connect to a new world, or to realities that feel empty and detached from everyday life. At the same time, they are also part of the world that I see. Through the act of touching the prints and dissolving the ink, I explore moments in which the interior world of the photograph and physical reality briefly intersect.

In advertising, photographs generally fall into two categories: product photography and image-based photography. Product photography requires the accurate communication of color, form, texture, and textual information. I became interested in product photography - an area that is generally less recognized as “photography” - and approached it as a subject of study, producing this body of work through sustained photographic practice.

Photography is a device that renders visible the differences and delays of meaning and existence.
In photography, it is precisely the contradictions between what is visible and invisible, presence and absence, arrival and delay, life and death that give rise to what may be called ghostliness.
From this "ghostly" perspective, this work attempts to capture the subtle displacements that occur in between - to explore the boundary between presence and absence through photographs.
Like the moment of seeing moonlight, there exists a light that remains absent: reflected from the sun, traversing vast distances and long spans of time, and yet arriving here, now.

Following my parents' separation, I began traveling regularly to a house in Nasu, Tochigi Prefecture, which my mother purchased as her final place of residence. In the villa area, traces of former prosperity remain, yet they are obscured by streetscapes carefully arranged to suit the image of a tourist destination. I had thought of rural areas as places that remain unchanged, but in Nasu, the legacies of the past coexist with a continually renewed present without ever fully aligning. This work seeks to render visible the process through which resources and culture are homogenized, and to critically reread the relationship between inherited legacies and ever-changing landscapes through three interrelated layers: time, space, and materiality.

When I am confronted with problems in which I cannot intervene - even involving a partner or a friend - I am left with a sense of helplessness. At a certain point, I began seeking out and photographing subjects that seemed to embody the anxiety buried deep within me and the eeriness I feel in human relationships. As I pressed the shutter, I remained conscious of the distance between myself and the subject. In that moment, the version of myself holding the camera overlapped with the version of myself that measures distance from others and carefully reads their expressions. There is the distance required to photograph a subject well, and there is the distance maintained so as not to make the other person feel uncomfortable. By setting these two forms of distance in contrast, I became aware - for the first time - of a hidden side of myself, one I do not reveal to others. In that realization, I felt that, through photography, I might also be able to find an appropriate distance from the unsettling sensations within myself. In this way, I came to feel that I had discovered at least one way of living with my own emotions.