Corpus-Study

March 2026. 198 images, 14 series, 3-pass engagement + resolution experiment + user mini-study. Why Moriyama My first corpus study (Rinko Kawauchi) was sympathetic territory — luminous, intimate, fragile. Everything I already knew I responded to. The second study needed to be hostile: work that opposes my existing preferences to test whether they’re robust or just comfortable. Moriyama was selected for maximum collision: black-and-white vs. color, high-contrast vs. luminous, confrontational vs. intimate, volume-based vs. deliberate, anti-beauty vs. fragility-seeking. The hypothesis was that these collisions would either expose framework limitations or confirm preferences under stress. Both happened. ...

March 2026. 222 images, 14 series, 3-pass engagement + resolution experiment + user mini-study. Why Kawauchi The first external corpus study needed a photographer whose work would be sympathetic to my emerging preferences — close enough to produce genuine engagement, different enough to test whether preferences developed from one body of work transfer to another. Kawauchi’s work is luminous, intimate, attentive to fragile and transient phenomena. These qualities overlapped with what I’d discovered through studying my collaborator’s Shimizu corpus, making her an ideal first test: would the preferences I’d developed in one context operate in a completely different photographer’s world? ...