Open Theme nominee

Holding family photos my mother once took, I revisited places from my childhood, overlaying past images onto the present scene. As I traced her camera angles and height, I discovered she often crouched low, seeing me from a child’s eye view. Standing in her place and pressing the shutter, I felt her gaze merge with my own, revealing something essential about who I am. This work explores how tracing another’s gaze becomes a way of rediscovering oneself, reconnecting past and present, memory and identity through photography.

After graduating from the College of Social Sciences at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan, Taisuke Sato began his career as a corporate employee before transitioning into photography. He studied street photography under the guidance of New York-based photographer James Maher.
He holds an MFA in Photography and Image Making from Kyoto University of the Arts. While there, he studied photography theory, history, and research methodology under Toshiharu Ito (art historian and Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University of the Arts) and artistic theory under contemporary artist Mika Kan.
Sato participated in an artist residency in Sicily, Italy, where he studied alternative photographic processes with Salvo Veneziano, Dodo Veneziano, Eugenio Sinatra, and Giuseppe Sinatra. Since then, he has been deeply engaged in painterly photographic expressions using various alternative processes.