Foreword to INSOMNIA

My insomnia began in Tokyo, although I was not there. Our daughter, Anna, is an exchange student in the city for a year. She told us about earthquakes—about waking in her dormitory to the building shaking, about learning to distinguish between what is harmless and what is not. On December 9, 2025, an earthquake of magnitude 7.5 struck off Japan’s northeast coast. At that moment, Anna was inside an elevator, on her way to the sixth floor of her dormitory. The elevator shook. It was a terrifying experience.

That night, and many nights after, sleep no longer arrived. Instead, I watched the ceiling and the walls as streetlights and moonlight projected moving shadows across them. The shadows swayed, fractured, slipped out of alignment—quiet, unstable, never settling. I began to photograph them, night after night, as if recording a seismograph of my own unease.

Later, I found myself watching footage of elevator incidents, earthquakes, and tsunamis—images of motion without control, of structures failing, of time stretching during moments of fear. The images was already blurred by transmission, motion, and compression. Capturing these scenes with my camera, I was surprised how closely they resembled the photographs of my walls and ceilings. The same trembling gestures. The same visual uncertainty. The same sense of being caught inside movement.

The shadows in my home and the disasters on the screen began to merge. Distance collapsed. My daughter’s experience and my own insomnia formed a single visual language—one of shaking, drifting, and incomplete resolution. These photographs are not documents of events. They are documents of a condition: of nights spent awake, of fear translated into light, of motion that never fully comes to rest.

Insomnia is a book about distant events that fracture sleep, and about the attempt to make sense of that chaos that was reflected back the dark interiors of our house. I also find comfort in the thought that someone else also might find beauty in all this turmoil.