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Let’s assume there is some brainwave that suddenly prompts me to think about the present state of photography in Japan.

Fact of the matter is, I’m quite simply not really interested in such things in the first place, because no matter what I came up with as an answer, you would reply that photography and photographers in Japan, and just about everywhere else in the world, have long been living in their own respective bubble, seriously dedicated to their own thing in their own reality. That would make perfect sense to me, and as a result, I would once again get caught up in a state of mind unable to pursue – let alone answer – the question what exactly photography means to me now.

A photograph is something that fragmentarily reflects the sensibility and sensitivity of a photographer in the very moment he or she releases the shutter, and the things in it instantly become the photographer’s own. But once it is reproduced and printed or exhibited, it disperses into the multifariously shaded folds of the audience’s gaze, where it establishes itself as a unique and hard new reality, and as a manifestation of some kind of memory, which again works as a mighty, enigmatic tool that connects past, present and future.

It is nothing more and nothing less than a camera, and we photographers can only take our hats off to Monsieur Nicéphore Niépce and thank him for inventing it.

These are the things that I have on my mind as I look back on another day of wandering around and taking snapshots in the streets; another day of asking myself what photography is all about, and being reminded that it’s just the great thing that it is.

– from afterwords by Daido Moriyama