17 Syllables – Inner Landscape extends my ongoing series, 17 Syllables – Echoes of Stillness, through a journey in Provence. Inspired by haiku and the Japanese concept of ma, it explores silence, emptiness, and the space between presence and absence. After a sudden squall transformed the landscape, travel photographs began to merge with flowers I arranged and photographed in Japan. Moving between color and monochrome, foreign landscape and remembered form, the work becomes a visual haibun in which Provence and Japan resonate, creating a place that exists only through memory and perception.
Keiichiro Muramatsu was born in 1972 in Shizuoka, Japan. He attended a Focal Point professional photography course in Vancouver in 2001-2002. After returning to Japan, he founded The Fourth Avenue Studio in Hamamatsu in 2008, focusing primarily on portrait photography. In 2013, Muramatsu began practicing Nageire—a freeform style of ikebana—and incorporated its sensibility into his photographic work, marking the renewal of his artistic practice. His photographs are held in private and corporate collections in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and other countries worldwide.
