Commonly, the medium of photography is seen as ‘perfectly,’ composed images published in newspapers, magazines, and advertisements as an accompaniment to textual pieces. The idea of making books or building exhibitions are often discussed within smaller circuits, who are primarily immersed in the artform themselves. It was a similar journey for Okahara, whose exposure to photography was directly equated with working for a publication and following lesser-known stories, rather than an avenue to explore personal narratives.

In 2007, he was convinced by friend and researcher Takeshi Nishio, to undertake a journey within the ex-leprosy colonies in China, where the stigma surrounding the disease was still extremely prevalent. At first, Okahara was unsure how he would document the people still living with the stigma, while also being respectful towards their identities. But later he realised that merely showcasing their everyday existence would tell the world about the harsh experiences that they live amidst. “Here, I was focused on capturing the existence of people to say ‘they are here’ through my pictures,” explains the storyteller.

This work, titled Vanishing Existence, was published twice before Okahara decided to make it into a book in 2012. While going through his archive, he was contemplating ways to showcase the project through ancient forms, in order to stay true to the age-old existence of this distressing disease. Eventually, the photographer made a stab binding book printed on Kozo, which is paper invented approximately 1,300 years ago from the inner bark of mulberry trees ; a 10m scroll book which is an ancient form in itself; and a 100x70cm gigantic stab binding book purely as experimentation.

“I realised that viewing a large photobook, is a completely different experience since you are moving your entire body to turn over the pages. It somehow changes the way you read the imagery,” elucidates Okahara. Similarly with the scroll, there seems to be a slow unravelling of the story, much-like the photographer’s travels to these villages that were shrouded in mystery and the unknown. As Teju Cole puts it so succinctly in his piece ‘In Praise of the Photobook’ - “All books are chronological, but the feeling of being guided, of being simultaneously surprised and satisfied, is particularly intense in photobooks.”

This obsession with narrative guiding Okahara’s photography continued for numerous years, until a personal revelation in 2015; when he was in Colombia, working on a story about the impact of drugs on the local community. The image-maker suddenly found himself seeing the same photographs that he had previously made, predicting the scenes that would play-out through the day, and forcing images that would fit into his storyline. “I kept asking myself if I am really documenting. Am I able to go beyond the narratives that govern my mind? Am I truly free through my imagery?” he questioned.

There was an internal battle while traversing the lines between truth and pre-existing visuals. This thought haunted Okahara, who had previously also worked on photojournalistic work in a book titled Fukushima Fragments (2011-2014) that documents the painful aftermath of the explosion at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (2011), and Ibasyo (2003-2018) that is a sensitive collection of images that profile the lives of six young Japanese girls who suffer from self-harm. Even though the photographer’s imagery is intuitive, immersive, comprehensive, and oddly cinematic, his mindspace that saw repetitive stills was hard to overcome.

It was this frustration of stringent storytelling that paved way for Blue Affair that won World Press Photo 2022, the Jury’s Special Mention at Las Palmas International Film Festival and the Best Contemporary Experimental Short Award at Sapporo International Short Film Festival. The act of photographing with no agenda was freeing, and brought about a freshness to the image-maker’s ways of seeing. While reading the visuals, there is a distinctive sense of movement that is embedded within the frames that Okahara says might be a result of his aforementioned restlessness. To make an edit of the seemingly-random archive that spanned over 3 years was rather challenging, but once the photographer decided that he would use it as an avenue to make sense of his recurring dreams, the narrative presented itself within the photographs.

“A Japanese film director validated this work further. He wisely said that the words ‘motion-picture’ literally came from the usage of 24 still images per second, and so, this concept of creating a stop-motion made perfect sense. Additionally, I read that our dreams move because our brain is trying to make sense of still-images that we have stored within us,” explains the animated photographer. As the metaverse and physicality of images are in a constant state of transition, it’s understandable that visual artists are expanding their mediums of expressions. While it is assumed that the form of the single image will always remain, its existence is being moulded and melded to fit an elastic imagination – one with infinite possibilities.