I photograph three things: what grows, what gets eaten, and where it happened.

Made over one year, in two places: the Basque coast where I live, and a long trip through Japan. Nara, Kyoto, Osaka, Kanazawa, Nikkō, Wakayama, Hakone. The two halves are not supposed to belong in the same archive. They do, because they are the same subject.

There is a Japanese word for that subject. Shakkei, borrowed scenery: you compose so that the view beyond the garden becomes part of the garden. You show only the piece of the distance you want shown, and you hide the rest. You tie it to something near enough to touch, until the near thing and the far thing read as one object. It is a principle of composition, not of gardening, which is to say it is what a frame already does.

So I decide what a picture has to do before I decide where to stand. Nothing here is arranged. The deer in Nara were not fed into position, the streets in Kanazawa were empty because I got there at the hour that empties them, and the fruit was photographed the morning it was bought and eaten that same afternoon. What I control is when I show up and where I stand. A photograph that is only beautiful has not finished its work.

At Nachi, in Wakayama, this stopped being a thing I believed and became a thing I saw. The falls come down 133 meters in one unbroken drop. The pagoda of Seiganto-ji stands at the single distance from which you can hold both in one look, and the cedars around it show what the builders wanted shown and hide everything else. Somebody chose that, long before there was a lens to prove it works. I stood there and cried.

A frame is a decision about what to leave out, and that decision travels. It works on a cliff, on an empty lane at six in the morning, on a few pieces of fruit on a kitchen table. It will work on whatever you put in front of it.

Available for commissions. Prints of any plate in the archive, on request.