: Subtly More Than.

A decision to hold something in. Into this rectangle photographers cuts the world, disappears the reality. For ten years, Kumagai has asked after clicking the shutter : “When the image appears before us, where does the vanished go?”

To reveal something is to retract the rest — and the disappearance gives the room to be read. Beyond the frame exists the margin in which what we see could still be something else.

Kumagai’s photographes opens this precision into a gap. In the room left by everything withheld, the only that is shown is subtly so much greater than the epilogue. The interlude suspends, a passage between states, unresolved, still able to lead elsewhere. His fragments refuse completion, and in refusing, they hold more than a whole could. The world as it might still be.

Finality, completion, the sealed wholeness of a view do not always bring clarity — of the view, of the definition, of intention in itself. In the making of these rectangular boundaries, the blank passe partout, rather relieved, keep his question alive.

Our walls hang this narrative accordingly, giving each work its possibility that emerges from absence.

Yuki Kumagai is a Tokyo-based portrait and editorial photographer born in Tokyo, Japan.

Watch our interview with Yuki Kumagai here .

His first photobook, Interlude, is available with us here .

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Inkjet Fine Art Print mounted on Dibond,
Natural aluminium frame
40 x 60 cm
Edition 1 of 5
Signed, stamped, numbered and dated