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6 articles
Kintsugi repairs broken pottery with gold, making the fracture the most beautiful line on the vessel. I decided to run that philosophy backward through a decade of abandoned sketchbooks — mending torn pages, tracing over dead-end drawings, and photographing every scar. The results surprised me more than any finished piece ever has.
For 100 straight days, I sketched someone from my Brooklyn neighborhood as if Utagawa Kuniyoshi had a studio above the laundromat. The bodega owner became a merchant prince. The subway dancer became a kabuki star. Here's what a 200-year-old lens revealed about the people I pass every morning — plus free prints for you.
My studio's teetering stacks of 47 unread American novels aren't a to-do list — they're a portrait of who I'm becoming. A photo essay and a defense of tsundoku, the art of letting books pile up without apology.
My grandmother ran a kissaten — a Japanese jazz café — for forty years, and I spent last winter photographing its every corner. Now that I'm building a small listening space in Brooklyn, here are the seven design lessons I'm translating from her dim, vinyl-lined sanctuary to a New York basement.
Wabi-sabi, layered composition, the whole sacred playbook — Nama Takahashi spent a year deliberately breaking her training to see what her American audience would teach her. Five rules got bent. One turned out to be unbreakable.
What happens when a train station waiting room, a laundromat, and a backyard sprinkler get the nihonga treatment? Nama Takahashi spent a summer photographing ordinary American scenes using the rules of Japanese still-life composition—and found poetry in places usually reserved for waiting.