Exhibition Views
Exhibition view of Sillons de Lumière,
Ithaque, Paris, France, 2026
Exhibition view of Sillons de Lumière,
Ithaque, Paris, France, 2026
Exhibition view of Sillons de Lumière, with a sound installation by Vincent Rioux
Darkroom, Ithaque, Paris, France, 2026
DARKROOM
Exhibition view of Sillons de Lumière,
Darkroom, Ithaque, Paris, France, 2026
Exhibition view of Sillons de Lumière,
Darkroom, Ithaque, Paris, France, 2026
What if photography contained more than what is visible…
Following the great earthquake that struck eastern Japan in 2011, Ayako Sakuragi began a sensitive inquiry into what it means to see and inhabit the world. Her work explores the relationships between landscape, time and memory, while questioning the place of human beings within nature.
For this series, produced between Paris and Arles, Ayako Sakuragi uses the pinhole photography technique. A primitive photographic process, the pinhole camera consists of a simple box pierced by a tiny aperture, without a lens. Combined with very long exposure times, it allows light to inscribe duration onto the image and reveal phenomena that would normally remain imperceptible.
In Sillons de lumière, photography moves beyond the simple representation of reality. Light is understood as a wave, a moving material that carries vibrations, memories and information, much like sound.
The landscapes thus become witnesses to invisible flows that photography makes perceptible. Through this approach, Ayako Sakuragi invites us to slow down our gaze and question our habitual ways of perceiving. In a world saturated with instantaneous images, her works offer a contemplative experience in which photography becomes a trace of time, light and the invisible relationships that run through our environment.
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Paris/Arles 4,
2026,
W 104 × H 50.5 cm,
C-print from a pinhole negative,
Unique edition.
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Paris/Arles 6,
2026,
W 82 × H 40.5 cm, C-print from a pinhole negative,
Unique edition.
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Paris/Arles 8,
2026,
W 80 × H 49.8 cm,
C-print from a pinhole negative,
Unique edition.
Biography
Born in 1978, Ayako Sakuragi studied French literature at Sophia University in Tokyo before studying fashion design at Studio Berçot in Paris. After eleven years working at Comme des Garçons, she returned to artistic studies. She graduated with a Master’s degree from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2021 and received her DNSAP from the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2022. In 2024, she was a finalist for the Dior Photography and Visual Arts Prize for Young Talents, and in 2025 for the Sisley Beaux-Arts de Paris Prize. Her work 108 jours is part of the collection of the ARTER Museum in Istanbul. She is currently a resident of La Capsule – Résidence Création Photo in Le Bourget and a doctoral student at the École nationale supérieure de la photographie. She continues her artistic practice and experiments between Paris and Arles.
Sillons de lumière
What if photography contained more than what is visible…
When nature was more present in our lives, we may have been more sensitive to these invisible correspondences. Photography can evoke them and cast doubt on the way we see.
Photography is an inscription of light — but also of vibrations, frequencies and waves. Like sound.
Light shares something with the nature of sound: it travels, propagates and carries information. Photography records its traces on a sensitive surface.
Can the image, then, be considered a potential score?
Before the invention of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell developed the Photophone, a device that could transmit the human voice through a beam of sunlight set into vibration. Light can therefore carry sound and contain information.
The landscapes we look at are themselves moving phenomena, traversed by continuous flows of light. In a camera obscura, this becomes apparent: images are not fixed; they float, circulate, appear and disappear. Yet our eyes do not perceive these flows of light as autonomous images, because everything merges into the continuity of the luminous world.
Pinhole photography can freeze this movement. It retains a duration of the world. If duration is inscribed within it, then perhaps the photograph contains more than what it shows.
If we could look at the world as a long-exposure pinhole camera does — leaving our eyes open for hours — our vision and our perception of the world would probably be very different.
Today, the word “image” has become a rapid, consumable, almost instantaneous surface. Yet an image can be something denser: not simply a representation of reality or the visible, but also an inner presence, a memory, a multiple and complex sensation, sometimes rooted in an experience that precedes language.
People who are visually impaired or blind perceive space through sound, resonance, distance and vibration. They construct another form of vision of the world. Perhaps even a perception closer to reality than that produced by a gaze saturated with images.
Our bodies are probably capable of decoding more of the information encoded within light. But this may require us to change the way we see.
Sillons de lumière thus proposes an understanding of photography not only as image, but as trace, vibrational memory and score — a surface where the visible might also become audible.
- Ayako Sakuragi