I’d characterise my time in Japan as extremely lonely and introspective, and so my imagery has been born from those ingredients.

TS: Do you photograph alone?

CE: Yes, almost exclusively. It's often nighttime and I'm in a foreign city and it can just be a bit strange if you've got two people walking around. Whereas, if it's one person, I'm able to slip into the shadows.

TS: You lived in Japan for a number of years and now you're based in Te Whanganui-a-tara Wellington. Do you look differently at places that are unfamiliar to you compared to places that are familiar?

CE: It's an interesting dynamic. I think the way I photograph New Zealand has taken a lot of practice to get to this point. I don't know if I’d consider taking photographs the way I do if I had never traveled or lived overseas.

My mode is of an outsider looking in and I think these images tell the story of an outsider. I think a lot of other New Zealand photography is more human-centered, there's people in the work and it tells human stories, whereas I'm much more interested in the story of the place. That's when I'm putting on my Japanese hat and thinking: as a Japanese photographer, what would I do? I've got this double mind. It's that separation and then introspection that leads to the image.

TS: Are you trying to depict reality or to manipulate it?

CE: My practice started in Tokyo and the thing that always fascinated me about that city was the layers of history. If you've ever been to Japan or Tokyo, you quickly become aware that there's a lot of old stuff, but it's not really that old. It's from the ‘60s and ‘70s. There's this whole tranche of architecture from that post-war era and that replaces everything that came before, which you can only really find in rare examples.

They were thinking, at the time it was built, “What will the new world look like? What are we rebuilding after this trauma of WWII?”

CE: It's cinematic. The way I shoot, everything is in focus. Often with the focal length of the lens you get a blurred background or foreground, but everything's in focus with my work, so that you can look into it and read the story. That's not something I'm crafting, but that kind of mise en scène is within the image because it's a lived place, it's not set up. 

TS: Do you do much work in post-production?

CE: I do a lot of editing, primarily the levels. I create a huge raw file that gives me a lot of room to boost the shadows or play with the tones.

I use a Sony Alpha. I've been using it for a few years now. And I've built a relationship with Sony New Zealand and Sony Japan as well, to a degree. They actually sponsored me with a camera Sony Alpha, A7R4, which is an excellent camera. And I also use a tripod. 

TS: You walk around with your tripod on your back?

CE: Yeah! It's quite big. There's a tradition that I follow: I always wear the same clothes; I have the same setup and it's a very learned process that I follow. And so when I that process changes or something happens, that can throw me off a little bit. I like to follow my routine. I think creatives call it a flow state, when I'm in that space I'm not able to do anything else.

I have my bag, my tripod, and the shutter release that I use that is a cable. When I'm photographing, I have it in my mouth so that I can operate the camera and take the photo but also see what’s around me.

I have two lenses, but I mainly just use one lens, a 50 millimeter. I've locked in my settings: all my images are F11, five to ten second exposure, ISO 200, and 1.2 meters off the ground. That's it. And so I don't need to do anything else in that space except the thing that matters, which is the composition. 

TS: Do you think people look at photography differently online as opposed to printed in an exhibition space, or in a book?

CE: Online consumption is quick, but I think there's an inability to string images together. I believe the real value is being able to produce a series of images online, and make that coherent. You can do a carousel, or scroll on Instagram, but I’ve never felt it’s the right experience.

Whereas, in a book, you can define a linear path for the reader, and it's tactile, so they're going slow down. It’s the same with an exhibition, because you have to wander through the space. The relationship between images and the gallery is also important. In The Places We Call Home, there is a photo of Andrew Ross’s, and you can see the same building out the gallery’s window. So you get a temporal relationship. When you slow down, and walk through the series, you start to ask questions, which if you've got a millisecond on Instagram, you're not going to do that.

I think digital culture encourages the money shots, but they don’t prompt the same level of consideration as an exhibition or a photo book. Digital culture can lead to a simplistic image making, and also very literal, because you haven't got time to ask a question and wait for a response. Whereas, with longer format work, you can slow down and get people thinking and they come out of it with something more.

TS: Seeing something with your body as much as your eyes and your body's relationship to it, I think prompts a different way of thinking.

CE: I think it's easy to be forgetful when you're on a phone and consuming media constantly. Like a desktop computer maybe is a little bit different, but definitely on a phone it’s so rapid. 

I think it’s interesting to think about ways to slow people down on the web and really give them something to look at — I think there’s an interesting negotiation between those two speeds. 

TS: I had a look at Derive magazine and I see you do print and digital versions of this magazine.  

CE: My real passion is print and longer format storytelling. Derive is the word I use for the wandering process that I follow. The magazine is my musings on different places. In the latest edition I explored Hong Kong; it’s very whimsical and dreamlike, and combines images and words. We just do a limited print run, and people get really passionate about it, and there are some who collect the whole series. 

TS: Looking ahead, are there any digital storytelling ideas that you’re excited about exploring in 2023?

CE: I'm interested in audio and spoken-word or ambient soundscapes. I think digital storytelling can become more multi-sensory, not even necessarily video, but sound and combined with images.

TS: What photographers do you love and follow?

CE: One of the photographers that I admire is Greg Gerard. He's a Canadian photographer who shot a lot in the ‘70s and ‘80s in Japan, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia. What I found fascinating is that he sat on the images for many years, and his work is only really coming out now; he's done a few books.

I don’t think there's a lot in common in terms of our technical approach, but we do share the idea of night as a place of transience, and how night can transform a city.

The other thing is this idea of the time capsule. My intention is that, say 20 years from now the images in this exhibition still fulfill a role; the building themselves may be gone.

How can I sit on this work for a long period of time? And how will the meaning of the images change? There are already buildings in the Derive books that have been demolished. I feel I have a kind of responsibility to capture them and document that story, but not just an objective diagram of the building, but the story of how it felt; the image needs to convey what a space felt like.

TS: That’s interesting in relation to your images having everything in focus, too. They have a crisp all-over documentation. You capture all the details.

CE: I think of it as a scientific approach. The lens that I use is like architectural lenses; it's called a tilt shift lens. It allows you to get very straight lines and control the image more than you would with a normal lens. You can see how the lines are all vertically straight. In some ways, it’s cold and clinical and thorough. I think the building is showing itself as it is, with all of the details and decorations in focus.