My love of travelling started from my childhood, when my parents took me to live in New York City, from Tokyo’s suburbia where I grew up in Japan. Western old-style buildings were rather honourable and respectable, is the feelings that I recall.
I travelled to New Zealand in the early 1980s to shoot landscapes, not long after I started living in Sydney and started photography. I was naturally attracted by the buildings as well, wherever I was staying, ending up with my camera in hand walking around shooting the town.
As I lived in this part of the world for a while, I started to appreciate not only the famous old buildings but also the simple ordinary shopfronts, pubs, halls, theatres, or whatever buildings surround us in a town that have a local colour and style about them.
Other than the rather recently taken digital photographs, all the older ones were shot in transparencies (slide film) and they had the year printed on the paper mounts of the film. Some were put into different mounts over the years for some reason and the original shot date information was lost. There were more than several of them that I researched to find out when they were taken.
Another interesting process while compiling this book was researching for the captions to go with every photograph. Quite often it’s more of an instant reaction for me as to what was there at the time I take the photographs. What’s there for me has to do with the mood of the place, often created by the light, all sorts of different light. Sometimes, I am not aware of what the building is, as it’s an instant reaction to just click. When researching about the buildings later, I often found them to be significant buildings with a well-recognised, interesting background.
Is it simply the mood created by light that inspires me to shoot, or is it something beyond that the building has, which I sense and triggers me to shoot?