The Sound of Someone You Love Whose Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter is an ongoing photographic project made across repeated visits to Japan. Through marriage, Japan has become both familiar and distant: a place of family, routine and belonging experienced from the perspective of a visitor. Separated by geography, time and circumstance, each journey is marked by the awareness that departure is inevitable. The work considers what it means to inhabit a place that can never be fully lived in, only repeatedly returned to.
The title is borrowed from the 1976 composition by the Penguin Cafe Orchestra. Poetic and quietly ambiguous, it evokes the emotional complexity of arrival and departure, where affection coexists with acceptance. Rather than describing indifference, the phrase suggests a gentler understanding: that the rhythms of leaving, waiting and returning are simply part of life. Like the music itself, the photographs favour subtlety over declaration, allowing mood to emerge through observation rather than explanation.
Made in cities and rural landscapes, within family homes, quiet interiors and everyday streets, the photographs avoid the spectacular or the exotic. Instead, they dwell on ordinary encounters: domestic spaces shaped by daily rituals, fleeting gestures between family members, roadside views glimpsed from passing trains, landscapes that become landmarks of memory through repetition. These fragments accumulate into a portrait of Japan experienced not as a destination but as a place of intermittent belonging.
The distance between England and Japan inevitably shapes the work. Long-haul travel, financial realities and the passing of time determine the rhythm of each visit, making every return both familiar and uncertain. The photographs are informed by this awareness of impermanence. They are less concerned with preserving memory than with acknowledging its incompleteness; every image exists alongside those moments that could not be photographed and those that will inevitably change before the next visit.
Photography becomes a way of negotiating this condition. The camera does not seek to resolve feelings of absence or distance, but to inhabit them. Through repeated journeys, familiar places acquire new meanings while remaining fundamentally elusive. The work is neither documentary nor travel photography in a conventional sense, but a meditation on family, migration, attachment and the emotional geography created between two homes.
Like the title from which it borrows its name, The Sound of Someone You Love Whose Going Away and It Doesn’t Matter embraces contradiction. It reflects the quiet resilience required to love places and people separated by oceans, finding beauty in transience and recognising that departure is not an ending but another moment within an ongoing cycle of return.
David Bennett Photographer 