Photography is a medium for capturing what stands before us. Camera technology continues to evolve, allowing the world to be recorded with ever greater resolution, precision, and freedom from distortion. But once we can capture almost everything perfectly, what is left for a photographer to photograph?

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Kensaku Kakimoto’s photography exhibition Always Now – Light Reflected in Glass is currently on view at Hillside Forum, Daikanyama Hillside Terrace in Tokyo. Working across film, television drama, and advertising while also pursuing photography and contemporary art, this is Kakimoto’s third exhibition at the venue, following TRANSLATOR in 2016 and TRANSFORMATION in 2021. For this exhibition, he has created a new series, Hikari, using ten transparent glass works made by glass artist Ritsue Mishima.

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Here, however, the glass is not simply a subject to be photographed. Kakimoto holds it in front of the camera, moves it by mere millimeters, changes its angle, and photographs the light and scenery passing through it. If photography fixes light, glass refracts it, unsettles it, and dissolves it. The images in this exhibition emerge where those two opposing qualities meet.

Encasing a Fleeting Memory in 2,000-Year-Old Ice

The project began not with glass, but with ice.

Kakimoto recalls encountering a glacier in Iceland. After existing for an immense span of time, a mass of glacial ice breaks away, travels down a river, and eventually washes ashore.

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The piece of ice he encountered was said to be around 2,000 years old. When he put some of it in his mouth, he experienced the strange sensation of something from 2,000 years ago entering his body. That experience led to an idea: what if a photographic instant could be sealed inside ice and preserved across a similarly vast span of time?

“I wondered if I could make something that would allow a fleeting moment—something like someone’s memory—to remain.”

Permanently preserving a photograph inside ice was, of course, impractical. Glass then emerged as another transparent material with qualities reminiscent of ice. After meeting Mishima, Kakimoto initially considered encasing a photograph itself within glass. But the result risked resembling the familiar form of a crystal photo frame, and the two abandoned the idea.

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Then they reversed the proposition.

Instead of putting a photograph inside glass, Kakimoto would photograph through the glass. What had been conceived as a “container” for preserving memory became a “lens” for transforming light.

Painting with Light Through Glass

Born in Kyoto in 1962, Mishima moved to Venice in 1989 and has since created colorless glass works in collaboration with glassmakers on the island of Murano, drawing on the material’s transparency and viscosity. Her works absorb the surrounding atmosphere and light, allowing the contours of light within a space to emerge.

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Ten glass pieces were created for Kakimoto for this project. Each differs in shape and thickness, and each refracts light differently. Place one in front of the camera lens. Shift it slightly. Tilt it. Even when looking at the same scene, the image transforms completely.

“Move it just a little and everything changes. Tilt it and it changes again. It started to feel a lot like painting.”

That is how Kakimoto describes the process. There is an element of control on the photographer’s part. At the same time, light is constantly changing. A passing cloud alters the brightness; the slightest movement of the body changes the relationship between glass and lens.

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It is not entirely accidental. Nor can it ever be completely controlled.

The photographer stands somewhere between the two, moving the glass almost like a brush and drawing an image with light.

Human Memory Is Not High-Resolution

The resulting photographs contain qualities that might conventionally be considered photographic “imperfections.”

Contours blur. Light bleeds. Landscapes distort. At times, it is difficult to immediately identify what has been photographed. For Kakimoto, however, that ambiguity is precisely the point.

“I think photography is a medium that faithfully and precisely reproduces what we see. But once something becomes a memory, it begins to dissolve. It doesn’t remain completely clear.”

Human beings do not remember the world as a camera does. When we recall a place, we cannot reproduce every contour, color, or position of light with perfect accuracy. Yet the light of a particular day, the atmosphere of a place, or the time spent with someone can remain with us as an unexpectedly vivid sensation.

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The photographs refracted through Mishima’s glass may not be making reality less accurate. Rather, they may be bringing the image closer to the way the human mind actually remembers the world.

Leaving Space for the Human Within Perfect Technology

This idea extends beyond Kakimoto’s photographic practice.

As a filmmaker and cinematographer who has also been involved in camera development, Kakimoto speaks about contemporary imaging technology from another perspective.

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Cameras continue to evolve toward higher resolution, lower noise, and greater accuracy. Yet artists often take those increasingly perfect images and deliberately disrupt them—adding filters or changing shutter speeds in search of an image with a more individual character.

“The evolution that technology strives for and what expression strives for seem, at some point, to move in opposite directions.”

Kakimoto says he tells engineers:

“Eighty percent is enough. Humans can fill in the rest.”

Rather than allowing technology to complete the image all the way to 100 percent, he wants to leave the final 20 percent open to human intervention.

That idea resonates directly with the process behind this exhibition. In front of an extremely precise camera lens, Kakimoto places glass that is individually shaped by human hands and inherently non-uniform. Distortion and fluctuation—the very qualities technology has worked to eliminate—are deliberately invited back into the image as tools of expression.

“Always Now”—Photography Is Born Again in Memory

High-resolution photographs and precisely generated AI imagery are rapidly becoming part of everyday visual culture. In such a moment, Kakimoto has chosen an intensely physical process: moving a piece of glass by a few millimeters, waiting for the light to change, shifting his own body, and searching for images that emerge partly through chance.

Kakimoto describes the process as “very analog,” adding that, in the context of the present moment, it made him feel that “AI couldn’t have done this.”

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A photograph fixes a moment of light. But the memory of the person looking at that photograph does not remain fixed.

A scene once before our eyes gradually loses its contours, overlaps with other memories, and sometimes transforms into an image different from what we actually saw. And yet, triggered by something unexpected, a scene from the past can suddenly return with the immediacy of the present.

The project began with the desire to seal a fleeting moment inside 2,000-year-old ice. That idea led to glass—and then, rather than sealing the photograph itself inside it, to photographing the light that passes through it.

Perhaps what Kakimoto ultimately arrived at was not a way to preserve memory forever, but a form of photography that continues to fluctuate, much like memory itself.

In an age when we can capture the world with extraordinary precision, he turns instead toward what cannot be fully captured.

The title Always Now opens photography, a medium expected to fix an instant from the past, toward a new “now” each time it passes through the memory of the viewer.