Finding the Gap: My Exploration of MA (間)

There is a Japanese concept called MA, written 間 – that describes the space between things. Not emptiness. Not absence. But the charged, meaningful interval that gives form its significance. The pause in music before the next note. The void in a room that makes you slow down without knowing why. The silence between words that carries more weight than the words themselves.

I came to MA not through study but through instinct. I had been making portraits for years, always drawn to something I couldn’t name – the moment between expressions, the breath before a person remembers the camera is there, the interior life that flickers across a face and disappears. I was chasing an interval without knowing that was what I was doing.

When I finally encountered the concept of MA, something settled. I had a language for what I had been pursuing all along.

The series that grew from that recognition became one of the most demanding and rewarding bodies of work I have made. Each image begins with a portrait, a real photograph, a real person, a real moment of presence. From there the process becomes deliberately disruptive. The image is printed, taken off the screen and into the physical world, then cut by hand, sometimes precisely, sometimes intuitively – the face divided, fragmented, rearranged. Those physical pieces are then rephotographed, the act of cutting and reassembling becoming part of the image’s history. Back in the digital realm, Photoshop’s AI tools are used to augment and alter, adding geometric elements, layering realities, pushing the image toward something that could not exist in a single moment or a single medium.

The process itself is a form of MA. Every translation between states, from photograph to print, from print to cut fragment, from fragment to rephotographed object, from object to digitally altered final work – creates another gap, another interval, another moment where the original and the copy diverge. The work carries the history of those crossings even when the viewer cannot see them. Intention and accident live in the same frame.

Each image in the series became an attempt to locate the interval somewhere different in geometry overlaid on a painted portrait, in grid lines fragmenting a face, in the void of a broken mirror, in the absolute silence behind a blindfold, in the hairline seam of a face almost whole, in gold threading through a shattered surface, and finally, most simply, most profoundly, in the shadow that natural light casts across a human face without any intervention at all.

That last discovery was the most important. After all the constructed interventions, all the deliberate fracturing and layering and reassembly, I found that MA was always already there. Light and shadow were always dividing the face. The interval requires no fabrication. It is inherent.

What I didn’t anticipate was where the series would lead me. Making MA forced me to articulate what I had been doing intuitively in my portrait practice for seven years. I am drawn to personality over image, to the moment when a person’s essential nature surfaces rather than the moment they perform for the camera. That gap between what a person shows and what they are is, I now understand, its own form of MA.

The interval is everywhere once you learn to see it. In a woman lying in autumn leaves, absorbed into the earth, the boundary between figure and ground becoming uncertain. In a face emerging through a fringe of colour, the gaze cutting through spectacle to assert something quieter and more true. In a daffodil held to a closed eye against an ancient stone wall, a gesture of pure private sensation, a person completely interior, completely present, completely elsewhere.

These are not composed images. They are waited for.

MA has taught me that the most meaningful things live in the gaps, between presence and absence, between the real and the imagined, between what is shown and what is withheld. As a photographer, my work is not to fill those gaps. It is to find them, honor them, and hold them open long enough for something true to pass through.

The interval is the subject.

It always was.

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