I went through an artist talk event and the public Grand Prize selection meeting, sandwiched between winning an Excellence Award and the New Cosmos of Photography exhibition. Over this time, I had a change in how I view my production and work. I had had few opportunities to talk about my work before, but the New Cosmos of Photography required me to speak in front of an audience. That necessity forced me to really think about my work.

The audience was made up of regular visitors as well as people in photography and the arts. So I had to make my explanations easy to follow since I was showing my works and making a presentation in front of regular people. So I’ve had more occasions to consider how to explain my works as well.

Once my ideas about my works were more firmly grounded, I felt like I’d come to an understanding of a very difficult book. To use a baseball metaphor, it was like I’d finally found my ideal swing, and now as a batter, I can adjust to any pitch. Like I can say with authority: “This is what the book is written about.” My understanding has emerged little by little.

It was an intuitive choice, so it’s hard to say why exactly. But the Venetian Lagoon is famous for glassmaking and a place of waves and light, and I thought those elements might make it a perfect place for photos. A bit of self-delusion could have been at play too [laughs]. I also believed heading overseas was the fastest way to give the creative process a jolt. I had a hunch my intuition was right because of my experience going to the U.K. as an exchange student in third year of university. Just pick up and head off somewhere far, far away. And what I found when I actually did go was that the light felt really very close.

I’m actually pretty bad at deciding on titles. On the other hand, I find going with something like “Untitled” rather pretentious, so it’s quite a dilemma for me. A desire to make films led me to try to create video works. And because my previous work Made of Stone was a quote from a film, I decided to relate this title to a film as well.

Lots of films have been set in Venice, but my knowledge of Italian film is pretty much limited to spaghetti westerns [laughs]. I was thinking about Leone and Corbucci, those kind of films, when I submitted a work that quoted The Great Silence by Corbucci to an exhibition in Osaka in August. I decided to stay on this path and come up with a title that reflected Corbucci for this work too. In looking up his filmography, I discovered an old Italian film sub-genre of historical epics called sword-and-sandal. The name seems to have come from the frequent appearance of gladiators in the films. These sword-and-sandal films were a launching pad to later success for a number of young directors, one of whom was Corbucci, working on shoestring budgets. Since I, too, had just made my debut, I took the name Sword and Sandal incorporating the idea that this marks the starting point of my journey.

I’ve been taking photographs for many years. But they never turned into finished works. Photography’s value system remains the display of single photos, forcing you to choose a single photo from hundreds. I was never able to do that. In a work like Made of Stone, I could put in 27 photos and no one would get angry [laughs]. It’s strange to say it, but I’ve been able to submit my works as something slightly different. For example, when it comes to entering the New Cosmos of Photography, having your photos in a book format is the best way to go, but when it comes to the exhibition, you can’t exhibit all the photos in your book. Which again leaves you no choice but to choose.

My photos have yet to mature beyond a certain standard, and it’s something I know I have to work on. The challenge I’ve set for myself is to try to put multiple photos into a single photo, a kind of regression, I suppose, to the idea of a single photo. For Made of Stone and subsequent video works, I inserted time as a way to stretch the prime decisive moment to click the shutter and take a photo — the “ah” moment — into an extended “ahhhh.” With the photos in Sword and Sandal, however, I took multiple repeated and simultaneous “ahs” of the subject facing the camera and inserted the decisive moments in fragments, like “ah, ah, ah, ah.” I find narrowing in on videos and photos in this way works well at the present time.