Photographs can feel like tactile memories. They are scenes that can evoke the passage of time and a resurgence of emotions. What we see in an image may not necessarily reflect one’s actual lived experience; it exists in the tension between documentation and perception. Even though a photograph is a form of record, it is still inherently subjective.
Soft Monuments moves across landscapes searching for moments where nature and human presence overlap in quiet, surprising ways. There is a rhythm of contrasts: a warm desert is juxtaposed next to the cool blue of distant water, man-made structures are softened by golden light, deer in the city of Nara are unbothered by my closeness.
These moments are slightly unmoored from time and held together by color and tension. In one frame, a pink dusk falls over an aerial expanse. In another, spring blooms erupt in the desert. Human figures appear small, scattered, and often turned away. Their role is observational and fleeting. They never dominate the frame. They only inhabit it momentarily.
The landscape becomes the main character: saturated, layered, often folding in on itself through manufactured objects, rock arches, or sharp ridge lines. Light does not just illuminate, but shapes. Morning light casts long shadows across open expanses or seeps through stone. There’s a quiet push and pull between intimacy and vastness, abstraction and detail.
This is not a romantic view of nature, but a study of its strangeness and stillness. Each photograph holds a subtle tension between natural and constructed, solitude and proximity, clarity and ambiguity. What binds them is a sense of careful observation and an interest in how place shapes feeling.
Together, these images suggest a landscape in flux—seasonally, environmentally, and psychologically. They ask us to pause, to see the in-between, and stay there for a moment longer.
