Yoyogi Park, Shibuya Ward, Tokyo

On the streets, following the flow of time and paths, gazing at lonely figures encountered by chance.

Yosuke Morimoto's first photo book compiles photographs taken between 2006 and 2023, arranged in continuous frames like film reels.

This series began with an encounter in Yoyogi Park, where he approached a woman standing alone, asking if he could take her portrait.

A forest in the city. Hidden within it are individual presences that are not easily noticed. Morimoto eventually stepped out of the park, meeting everyone lurking in the urban forest, capturing their portraits and the surrounding scenery through his lens.

These chronologically arranged photographs stretch like a walking path, with the unique faces and landscapes captured by the lens forming a continuous present moment.

They and those landscapes embody the tangible reality of familiar yet easily forgotten existences, looking back at the photographer and us.

Where are you, and what expression do you hide?

This is a photo book that engraves the essence of individual presence in the present moment, an existence often hard to perceive.

"When I developed the film and printed it, a woman with a sad expression appeared in the photograph. The expression a woman shows when being photographed by a stranger is similar to the expression a woman in a relationship shows at the moment of a breakup."

"Sometimes I get asked, 'Is it okay for me?' That woman didn't understand why I was taking her picture; instead, she was perplexed by the fact that she was chosen. Perhaps she hadn't yet recognized her own merits, or she lacked confidence. She didn't press me for the reason for the photo. Why? Perhaps truly beautiful people are those who are unaware of their own beauty."

"She said she wanted to see the cherry blossoms in Yoyogi Park. As she was leaving Tokyo for a while, it seemed she wanted to see them one last time. When you hear things like 'one more year, half a year,' the appearance of the cherry blossoms changes. The cherry blossoms in your eyes haven't changed, but it's not the cherry blossoms that changed, but your own state of mind. When you change, the world looks different too. You are constantly changing, and the person you were at that moment no longer exists. Even so, I want to remember how I felt then. Even if things don't go as planned, I hope to bring them to a satisfying close in my own way. Because of that experience, I cherish the present even more—I want to believe that."

──Yosuke Morimoto, Excerpt from Afterword