One month in Japan, 70 rolls of film—50 of them black and white. I set out with the intention to document, but quickly found myself forced to break my own habits as a photographer. Typically, I rely on slow processes; film demands precision, patience, and deliberation before every exposure. Tokyo, however, waits for no one. Because the city throws information at you faster than the mind can process, I mostly found myself shooting in motion. I took photos while walking briskly, from inside trains, and through windows where the rain had smeared the landscape, capturing people who hadn’t yet registered a camera was pointed at them. Consequently, the choice to shoot in black and white wasn’t purely aesthetic. Tokyo is overloaded with colors designed to seize attention: neon pink, the sharp yellow of advertisements, the bright orange of convenience stores. These are all parts of a mechanism built to sell, penetrate, and stimulate. Strip that layer away, and something much rawer remains: the wrinkles, the hunched shoulders, the gaze of someone staring through a train window. Without the color, the scenes become less touristic and less “Japanese” in the clichéd sense, revealing something far more human.

By nature, I am a shy photographer. Even at home, I prefer working from angles where I cannot be easily seen—from the side, or mostly from behind, shooting through glass or rain without the subject being aware of the camera. Because of this, I expected Japan to be a natural fit. It is a culture built on maintaining distance, respecting privacy, and avoiding conflict, which perfectly aligns with my approach. In practice, though, it was far more complicated. My shyness and Japanese shyness didn’t quite speak the same language. As a foreigner with a camera, you inevitably violate unwritten rules, even when you are trying to remain invisible. Every turn of the lens, even from afar, feels like a form of intrusion. Therefore, it demanded a completely different kind of awareness, not just of what I was photographing, but of how I was occupying space. I had to learn to wait for the image to compose itself, observe moments as they unfolded without my intervention, and simply trust time.

When I eventually left the big cities, everything felt different. The environment was less dense, much greyer, and noticeably quieter. While these places market themselves as cultural nature reserves where the past is carefully preserved, the people who live in them belong very much to the present. They carry the same phones, the same worries, and the same underlying fatigue of a society moving too fast without always knowing its destination. It was there that I photographed two men in dark suits standing so close together that their shadows merged into a single form. Dressed in the same tones, standing at the exact same angle, and looking at the same thing, they appeared staged. Yet, they weren’t; it was simply a spontaneous moment where two people unintentionally became a perfect composition.

Once back home, developing those fifty rolls took three months. This delay wasn’t due to any technical burden, but rather the need to digest the experience. When working with film, the result is never immediate. It waits for you, and you have to decide when you are ready to face it. Ultimately, some of the frames surprised me. I discovered compositions that had formed without my noticing: people stepping into the frame at the last second, a child’s face peeking between the headrests of train seats, and fleeting expressions on the street that had escaped my naked eye but were permanently captured by the emulsion. This process—the inherent distance between the click of the shutter and the final discovery—is an essential part of working with film. It forces you to relinquish control and accept exactly what the camera saw. Interestingly, when I returned to Tokyo at the end of the journey, something in me had already shifted. I was far less anxious about capturing the next photograph and much more present in the moment itself. The weeks I had spent navigating Japan had taught me to stop shooting out of a desire to produce images that matched my preconceived expectations. Instead, I began noticing the subtle, everyday repetitions: identical postures at different train stations, a traditional kimono contrasting with a glowing vending machine, advertisements looping endlessly. I started to see the rhythm of a massive, complex machine that keeps running even when no one is paying attention. Ultimately, in a country so saturated with ready-made imagery, you have to work incredibly hard to truly see, to cut through the dense layers of expectations and clichés, and discover the humanity hiding beneath them.