VORFREUDE
[2025-2026]

Five photographs. One mountain, seen once.

Vorfreude is the German word for the joy that lives in anticipation — the pleasure taken in something before it arrives. It has no English equivalent, and it moves in one direction only: it gathers, peaks, and is spent at the moment of arrival.

The sequence was made on the Shinkansen between Tokyo and Kyoto, on a journey taken to see Mount Fuji. An empty sky; a window that withholds the view; a figure waiting at the glass; the mountain, whole; then the dark. What it records is not the journey but the feeling — which was complete before the mountain came into view.

“It was never just about Mount Fuji. Twenty months of it in my head, four minutes of it through glass on Seat 11C of the Shinkansen. I saw it. I was happy. I would not have been less complete had the cloud kept its own counsel. The mountain was only the pretext the waiting required in order to begin.

The interval has no summit, no weather, no season. It is built out of wanting alone, and it was finished before the train pulled out.

Or perhaps that is only what a man tells himself in order to keep booking the same seat towards the same indifferent mountain.”

To be viewed in sequence.