Shota Nagase is a Japanese photographic artist based in Maebashi, Gunma. His practice explores how photography can give visible form to irreversible phenomena.
Rather than depicting fireworks as spectacular events, Nagase approaches explosion as a phenomenon that can occur only once. Fireworks serve not as his subject, but as a material through which combustion, bodily movement, time, and chance converge to generate images that cannot be repeated.
Since developing his original camera-drawing method in 2015, Nagase has continued to investigate photography as a process rather than a means of recording. Through long exposure, intentional bodily movement, and rotational techniques, each photograph emerges through a singular encounter between the artist, combustion, and photographic time. The resulting images do not describe fireworks themselves; they reveal the traces, structures, and voids left behind after the phenomenon has passed.
His work is rooted in the contradiction of gunpowder as both celebration and destruction. Rather than resolving this tension, he remains within it, exploring the fleeting interval in which destructive force is transformed into shared experience before disappearing once again.
Working between photography, drawing, and installation, Nagase treats the camera as a site of co-generation, where intention and forces beyond control exist simultaneously. His work asks what photography can preserve when its subject has already vanished, and whether disappearance itself can become a visible form.
Nagase has exhibited internationally, including at the Tashkent International Photo Biennale.
