Kawara Chan

I photograph people and their everyday lives on the streets of Tokyo. Street photography always involves a relationship between the photographer and the people in the frame, so I begin from respect for my subjects, and I try to let that respect show in the work.

When I started, I didn't shoot. I would sit in the crowd and watch the city. The concrete buildings seemed to tell me not to touch them — but people were agile, complex, alive, and those were the ones I wanted to photograph.

There is a Japanese idea, hare to ke — hare is the extraordinary (weddings, festivals, ceremony), ke is the ordinary day. When I find the ordinary inside the extraordinary, or the extraordinary inside an ordinary moment, I release the shutter.

I choose my photographs only after time has passed — once an image has drifted away from me and begun to belong to whoever is looking. I call them photographs that move away from me.