'Dreams of a Butterfly' (Zine I)
All photographs in this zine were taken between May and July 2025 in Japan. Developed over two months, the project began in a photography class where I was able to choose my own area of focus. During that time, I experimented with flash photography, street photography, and digital collage before bringing the work together into book form.
Color became the central element of this series, often taking priority even over subject matter. The overall aesthetic draws from a magazine-style layout.
Many of the collage works incorporate street photography. Due to Japan’s strict privacy laws, I obscured subjects’ faces through collage techniques. Other pages feature friends, which allowed me to preserve the photographs more directly, aside from stylistic edits.
'Photo Journal' (I) January-April 2025_Japan
This is the first photo book I have ever made. I chose an experimental approach, shaping it as a photo journal rather than a traditional, tightly curated series. While the final image selection is limited, the focus of this book is the process of making photographs — I show contact sheets and before-and-after comparisons to demonstrate the impact of editing.
Through the process of printing, I became aware of how differently images translate from screen to paper. Paper choice, ink density, and tonal shifts significantly affect the final result; images that appear balanced on a computer can print much darker. Experimenting with various papers and adjusting colors to match my vision became an essential part of the work — at times, it felt closer to painting than photography.