“What is your dream?”

In the past, I might have answered more easily.

I want to exhibit abroad.

I want to become famous.

I want to make large works.

I want to succeed as a photographer.

There was a time when I thought about things like that.

But now it is a little different.

Recently, when I think about what my dream is,

I think it might be this: that what I have made leaves my hands and goes on to encounter a world I have never seen.

That may be it.

I make a work and exhibit it.

Someone sees it.

They feel something.

It stays inside them.

And within that person, it turns into something different from what I had in mind.

That is what I find fascinating.

Though I made the work, it gradually stops belonging only to me.

I want to make works like that.

So I don’t think I need to limit myself to photography.

There are things photography can convey.

But there are also things photography alone cannot convey.

Then I can use painting.

I can make it three-dimensional.

It can become video.

I think my materials and methods will keep changing.

What matters is not how something was made,

but what I want to convey.What am I thinking, and does that thinking come through in the work?

That, I believe, is what matters.

I have one more dream.

That my works will remain even after I am gone.

Not only the photographs I took, but the things I have thought about and made, living on in someone else.

Perhaps it isn’t only the works.

The people who made works with me.

The people who looked at my photographs.

The people I will work with from now on.

The people who start something because of my work.

All of these connect.

I hope it becomes not just the activity of one artist, but a larger current.

I was born in Kyoto, lived abroad, and came back to Kyoto again.

I have taken photographs, run a shop, made music, and created art.

At each stage, what I was doing may look quite different.

But to me, it isn’t so different.

I think I have simply been following whatever interested me at the time.

So I myself haven’t decided everything I will do from here.

And I think that’s fine.

Someday, if someone who has seen my work tells me,

“Seeing this work made me want to create something too; it inspired me,”

I would be happy.

They might want to take photographs.

They might paint.

They might talk with someone about the work.

They might go somewhere they have never been.

They might begin to think about something.

I hope my work becomes the spark for something next.

Perhaps that is my dream right now: to become a spark for someone.

That what I have made leaves my hands and moves someone’s world, just a little.

For that, I want to take more photographs

and make more works.

And I want to see things I have never seen.

There is still so much I want to try.