https://www.hellofromgoto.com/home daily 1.0 2026-05-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/192cc94d-6971-48aa-a6d3-e2752ffbbd5b/grok-image-f41c0e8a-6efb-4645-bfc2-d01c2c9e2f5c.png https://www.hellofromgoto.com/about daily 0.75 2026-05-21 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/babb54fd-bfbb-4a40-9c3b-68c552b5abb7/website+headhot.png https://www.hellofromgoto.com/contact daily 0.75 2026-05-21 https://www.hellofromgoto.com/work daily 0.75 2026-07-15 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/aa2597ba-44aa-425b-8ae9-eb23e18cb249/L1420088.jpg Work Street Fold This image began as a road crossing and ended as a question about who is standing there. The same photograph is taken, reversed, and folded into itself until the lights and buildings rise like walls on either side and the centre drops into a dark, almost human shape. Above it, an orange sign glows with a circular emblem, like a tilted sun or a lantern held too high; below, the crossing’s grid stretches out in bands of shadow and amber, converging toward a single, empty point. When I look at it on the light box, my eyes keep falling into that centre – the void where a person could be, where a figure seems to hover without resolving. The more I stare, the more it reads like a self-portrait made without a face: two halves of the city pressed together, leaving a gap at the middle with nobody on it. The image feels crowded and deserted at the same time. This is the loneliness I recognise. The streets are bright, patterned, full of signs; the photograph is busy with detail. Yet the only place that holds my attention is the absence, the soft silhouette that might be me and might be nobody. In making the frame behave like a Rorschach painting, I gave the city a chance to show me what I was already carrying – that fault line between being in the crowd and feeling completely separate from it. This is why the image sits at the end of the five. It is the only one that looks back at me as much as I look at it, and it does so without offering any comfort, only a shadow in the middle of the lights. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/6c5e5b14-c978-44f2-a21a-a0d707cc478c/L1420061.jpg Work Lantern Spell This image feels like walking past a sheet of glass that has decided to keep something of you. Lanterns and vertical bands of text glow in reds and yellows, stacked down the centre of the frame. Behind them, a darker shape rises: a figure that is not quite a figure, made by taking the same reflection twice, changing its scale, and reversing it until the two bodies sit inside each other. From the street, the window offered only fragments – light caught in paper, characters I could not fully read, a shadow where someone might have been standing. Doubling the image on the light box turns that fragment into something more insistent. The overlapping silhouettes become a kind of standing presence, half made of signage and half made of absence. The bottom of the frame swells into a softer, rounded form, like a glowing robe or a pool of colour gathering at the feet of whatever is there. What stays with me is the way the city almost grows a person out of its own writing. No actual face appears, yet the eye keeps trying to find one between the lanterns. The photograph never quite lets that happen. It leaves me in the in-between, aware that I am looking at a reflection of a reflection, at a closeness to people when they have already turned into shadows on a window, and that my images sometimes carry more of that shadow than of the person themselves. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/69e11107-7103-4117-8a5f-c2732a51ade8/L1420055.jpg Work Afterlight The heat sits inside this photograph. I remember standing in front of the izakaya, the air thick enough to feel on the skin, looking through a plastic tarp that had gone soft with humidity. Inside, the light is blue and yellow, rising in vertical bands; at the edges two faces hover, almost symmetrical, almost unrelated, held there by the way the same frame has been reversed and laid against itself. The tarp turns everything into slow water. Figures stretch, blur, sink. When the image is doubled, the room becomes a kind of shrine to its own atmosphere: a central column of colour, faint gestures at the sides, the sense of bodies submerged rather than simply seated at tables. The two faces on either side could be different people or the same person caught twice; the overlay refuses to decide. It lets the viewer feel the closeness and the separation at the same time. What touches me in this image is the way it remembers the day as thickness rather than detail. I cannot hear the conversation, cannot see the dishes, cannot read any sign. I am left instead with a feeling: the weight of summer, the way plastic and light and breath build a wall that is translucent and resistant at once. This is what the project keeps returning to – the moments when I stand outside, half-inside the weather and half-outside the room, and realise that the only thing I can carry with me is the colour of the air around other people’s lives. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/5a7813a0-fe00-4cce-844c-e9c2a53523fd/L1420038.jpg Work Facade Glyphs This image feels like a city mask. Two photographs of an entertainment frontage – signs, screens, glowing columns of colour – are laid on top of each other in reverse so that the reflection folds in on itself. On the light box the centre thickens into a kind of figure: orange and magenta rising like a body, flanked by mirrored bands of light, the whole thing breathing against the glass. I remember standing outside, looking in without really entering. The cinema or arcade throws its noise onto the street in the usual way – sound bleeding through doors, light pushing through glass – but here I am held at the surface, watching the reflection more than the interior. Pressing one exposure against its own reverse turns that surface into something almost symmetrical, almost human, and not quite either. It feels like the building putting on a face for me, built from its own signage. What holds me is the ambiguity. This could be pure pattern: neon and screen light smeared into a vertical abstract. But once I’ve seen that central form as a kind of figure, I can’t unsee it. The work sits between portrait and architecture, between a person who is not there and a space that behaves as if it were. It is one of the places where the project brushes up against the synthetic portraiture I’ve been reading about – the danger of faces made from light rather than encounter – and it reminds me that even when I stay outside, the city will always find ways to look back. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69fac499fbd35b354dcfdac9/ced1a15d-a14d-4548-9838-291298f2dc6b/L1420001.jpg Work Ember Veil Two nights lie on top of each other here. At the bottom of the image, behind the soft cloud of a plastic tarp, a woman leans very slightly into the person beside her. The restaurant is almost all colour and blur from where I’m standing; the only thing that really reaches me is that small folding of her body toward another body, the way you see someone rest for a moment in the middle of noise. The second night arrives as light. Thin streams and hooked traces from another street, another walk, drawn out of signs and traffic and then laid over the restaurant on the light box. When the two meet, the room turns into weather. Amber and blue slip across her shoulder; the table becomes a slow river; faces appear, then dissolve, like figures caught in glass on a rainy evening. It feels less like a document and more like a memory you can’t quite line up — the kind that comes back as colour and movement before it comes back as fact. What I keep returning to is the distance. I am outside, half‑deaf to the room, looking through plastic and through my own streaks of light. Inside, two people are close enough for one to drift into the other without thinking about it. The photograph never lets me in. It lets me circle the surface: the tarp, the light, the suggestion of warmth. That is why it stays in this set. It holds a tenderness I could only ever see from across the street, and it reminds me that most of what I call abstraction is built on evenings like this, when somebody leaned into someone else and I was only close enough to catch the glow.