Scent of Time

A first photobook maquette heads to Bowen Island

Hello Walkers—

I have been trying to write a normal announcement and failing at it, so let me start with a bench in Madrid instead.

Last June, after a long day of walking and drinking around the city, Ludo and I ended up outside our hotel with something deeply unromantic and therefore perfect: late-night KFC. While we sat on a bench in front of the hotel, she read me the long email from FotoFilmic telling me I had been accepted into their Book Program with Greg Girard.

It was one of those moments that sounds invented only because life had arranged the props badly. A bench, a massive chicken breast, Madrid at night, and a note from Bastien and Virginie saying they saw something in the work.

They had looked not only at my submission but also at the surrounding life of the work: the long-running Out of Memory archive, Jinny Street Gallery, my years of moving through Japan with a camera, and the strange hope that all these observations could become a book that was not just about photographs, but about how time feels.

The book that came out of the program is called Scent of Time.

It began as a more conceptual attempt to work with my Out of Memory archive: synesthesia, urban textures, the passage of time, the feeling of moving through the world while somehow failing to experience it. It borrowed its title from Byung-Chul Han, but over months of meetings the project became less essay and more haiku. Greg kept pulling me toward my quieter color work, the photographs that did not explain themselves too eagerly. Japan remained in the pictures, but not as the subject. Place became atmosphere. Time became something closer to weather.

For a long while the project existed in the familiar, slightly dangerous form: folders, sequences, exports, little islands of confidence surrounded by doubt. On a screen, a photograph can always be moved one more time. You can convince yourself the book is almost there because there is no evidence to the contrary.

Paper is less polite. Paper immediately tells you where you are bluffing.

After the main stretch of the program, once Greg had helped me find both the narrative and the sequence, the next step was to make the thing physical. A few months ago, I spent five hours in bookbinding class cutting prints, stacking pages, gluing, sewing, and trying to turn a pile of photographs into something with a spine. The print house had sent the wrong binding spec. The colors were not quite what I had asked for. The cover was too certain and the inside was not certain enough. In other words, it was a prototype in the only meaningful sense of the word: useful because it was wrong in specific ways.

When I brought that first maquette to the FotoFilmic Book Program retreat in Tokyo, it stopped being a private arrangement between me and my files. Three days of reviews with Greg, Takayuki Kobayashi of Flotsam Books, Titus Spree, Naoko Uchima, Naoko Ohta, and the rest of the group made the project feel both more fragile and more real.

Naoko Ohta’s feedback stayed with me in a different way. She has an extraordinarily soft way of giving confidence: her words did not feel like an opinion placed on top of the work, but like something already inside it being gently revealed.

This is the strange generosity of a good critique: it takes away the fantasy version of the thing, and somehow leaves you more committed to the actual one.

Now the book has taken the next small step into public life.

The first prototype of Scent of Time will be shown as part of the FBP 2025-26 Photobook Exhibitions, opening on Bowen Island, just off Vancouver, on Saturday, June 27, 2026. My maquette will be there alongside the other books developed during the first edition of FotoFilmic’s Book Program, directed by Greg with Michael Kominek and Gonzalo Sanchez in supporting roles.

The Bowen Island exhibition runs from June 27 to July 25, 2026 at FotoFilmic Space:

• Opening: Saturday, June 27, 2-4pm
• FotoFilmic Space, 103-555 Prometheus Pl, Bowen Island, BC, Canada
• Follow-up reception: Saturday, June 27, 4-6pm at Miki Tanaka and Dana Lee Brown’s nearby studios, 585/589 Prometheus Pl

If you are near Vancouver, or know someone who is, I would be very happy if you stopped by. It is still a prototype, but I like that. The first public version does not have to pretend to be a sealed declaration; it can simply be an object on a table, asking to be held and flipped through.

The same group of books is also scheduled to travel to Paris during Paris Photo 2026 week, November 10-14, 2026. I will be there with the finalized maquette, so if you come through, please stop by and say hi.

Thank you to Bastien and Virginie at FotoFilmic for seeing the book before it was obvious, for making the program possible, and for carrying these small, vulnerable objects from private desks to public tables. And thank you to Greg for discovering the color work, then helping me shape it into a narrative and a sequence.

The finished book is still ahead of me. For now, there is a spine, a title, a table on Bowen Island, and a project that has become difficult to hide from.

That is usually when things start becoming interesting.

More soon,

—Toto

Photo by fellow FBP participant, Paulo Lopez.