Nijūsan-ku (二十三区)

Tokyo, 2010 — Medium Format & 35mm

Shot over 23 days in Tokyo at the age of 23, Nijūsan-ku is a photographic study of the city's 23 special wards — an incomplete but intentional drift through urban space, memory, and form.

The project began with a naïve ambition: that three weeks of walking might be enough to get a handle on one of the world's largest cities. It wasn't. Tokyo resisted that kind of understanding at every turn. What emerged instead was an acknowledgement of the impossible — a decision to lean into scale over depth, to let the city's vastness be the subject rather than trying to contain it.

Walking became the method: each ward encountered on foot, each image drawn from the slow accumulation of hours spent moving through spaces that were never designed to be still. The city shaped the looking as much as the looking shaped the work.

Photographed on 120 and 35mm film, the series shifts between architectural stillness and street-level presence — between the weight of the skyline and the quiet details beneath it.

Originally exhibited under the title Framing Japan at Hidden Leaf Gallery (Lewes) and Okinami (Brighton), with exhibition prints mounted and framed by hand.

This body of work is paired with Nijūsan-sai (二十三歳) / Twenty-Three Years Old, a companion collection focusing on locations beyond Tokyo. Together, they form a dual portrait of place and age — an archive of a moment in time, and the fraction of it that was caught.