In 2013, Ken Kitano spent a year in California to photograph his new landscape series in a continuation of his “one day” project. This project distinguishes itself first and foremost by the nearly day-long exposure times that many of its images have required (although some were also taken over the course of several minutes at slow shutter speeds).

Previous works from the ongoing “one day” project have focused on the memory of places. They have been taken in a variety of locations that range from the day-to-day to the historical, including urban streetscapes, ground zeroes of bomb blasts, islands of convalescence for leprosy patients, and old battlegrounds in Okinawa.

This particular exhibition is structured around photographs of two themes, “day light” and “watching the moon”, which offer the sun and the moon, respectively, as their subjects in a rumination on how human doings and nature relate to one another.

At every street corner, war memorial, abandoned building, and Californian highway he visited, Kitano sought to capture the scene that unfurled around him while deeply aware of the space between himself and the sun or moon.

Kitano believes the slight misalignments that arise between time on earth and time as it passes throughout the wider realm of the universe can reveal the miracle of our existence in the here and now.

*image (left)
courtesy of MEM