'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 encouraged 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 the series — often taking priority even over subject matter. The overall aesthetic draws from a magazine-style layouts
Many of the collage works incorporate street photography. Due to Japan’s strict privacy laws, I obscured subjects’ faces through collage techniques. Other images feature friends, which allowed me to preserve the photographs more directly, aside from stylistic edits.
I hope you enjoy viewing the work.
'Photo Journal' (I)
Photographs taken between January and April 2025 in Japan.
This was my first photobook. 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 — from contact sheets to before-and-after comparisons that reveal the impact of editing.
I included handwritten notes throughout, intentionally loose and at times nearly illegible, to preserve the intimacy of a personal journal.
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.