Over the years, my camera became more and more a way of pausing. not to explain the world, or set an opinion, but to create a space and step quietly within it.

This project, Japan Within, Home, Started 5 years ago, when my travels in Japan ended and my life in Japan began. Is a deep dive yet quiet exploration into the Japanese comfort zone, Inspired by the ideas of wabi, soft light, and timelessness.

Michael Sela (b. 1998, Israel) is a photographer working primarily with 35mm film. He began photographing at the age of 17, drawn to the emotional and visual depth that analog photography offered. At 19, he embarked on a year-and-a-half journey across Asia, where photography became not only a means of documentation, but a way to observe, reflect, and connect.

That journey eventually led him to Japan, a place that would become his home both personally and artistically. Living in Japan for several years, he developed close relationships with many of the people he photographed. An intimacy that shaped the tone and honesty of his work.

At the age of 21, he held his first solo exhibition at a gallery in Fukuoka, Japan. And later, thanks to a curator who believed in his work, he exhibited at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art in Haifa, the largest Japanese art museum in the Middle East. His photographs focus on subtle, quiet moments from everyday life, gestures, light, and stillness, often drawn from people and places he knows personally. [Official Website]

“Sela’s photographs express sentimental and magical emotions at the same time. His photographs are a means of connecting with a different, distant Japanese reality, but which are also very intimate. He photographs the touch of light on skin, paying attention to the elements of geometry, allusion, romance, fragility, aesthetics, humanity, and more.”

Text by Dr. Etty Glass Gisis, Chief Curator at the Tikotin Museum of Japanese Art (Haifa, Israel)