Aware
During a brief visit to Japan, I became completely enamoured and overwhelmed by the isolation and sadness that I had felt there. Weaving in and out of crowds, I really felt disconnected from others and everything else around me. Luckily, what this allowed me to do was to examine and observe the ever changing and chaotic streets of Japan from a distance. Though other factors such as the cultural and language differences also helped catalyst and push me to explore independently as an outsider.
What I found myself photographing was not the hustle and bustle of businessmen, nor was it the prominent culture that was so unique to Japan. Rather, I unknowingly chose to photograph the moments in between, the pauses of everyday life. The Japanese use the expression “Mono No Aware”, which translates to the pathos of things and represents an awareness of the temporality of life and the transient moments that occur throughout it.
Aware acts as a pause in our lives, the ones some of us drastically need while the rest of us look forward to. It’s our moment of solitude and self-reflection in a hectic and fast moving society. These photographs ultimately represent this notion of the temporal and fleeting, a notion that I desperately clung to in the chaotic streets of Japan.