The Sound of Someone You Love Who’s Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter is an ongoing photographic project made during repeated visits to Japan. Through marriage, Japan has become both familiar and distant—a place of family, routine and belonging experienced simultaneously from within and outside. Separated by geography, time and circumstance, each journey is shaped by the knowledge that departure is inevitable.
The title is borrowed from the 1976 composition by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Its quiet ambiguity reflects the emotional complexity of arrival and departure, where affection coexists with acceptance. The photographs similarly favour observation over declaration, focusing on ordinary encounters within cities, rural landscapes and family homes: domestic spaces, fleeting gestures, roadside views and landscapes encountered from buildings and passing trains.
The distance between England and Japan shapes the rhythm of the work. Long journeys, financial realities and the passing of time make each return both familiar and uncertain. Through repetition, places become landmarks of memory while remaining fundamentally elusive. Rather than functioning as documentary or travel photography, the work considers family, attachment, absence and the emotional geography created between two distant homes.
