Taisho Matsuguma is a photographer and branding director based in Fukuoka, Japan. Born in Fukuoka in 1991, he studied at Keio University’s Faculty of Environment and Information Studies before working in advertising and branding in Tokyo.
For more than a decade, Matsuguma has studied and practiced the Japanese tea ceremony. This practice informs his photographic approach: a way of seeing rooted in attentiveness, incompleteness, impermanence, and the quiet presence of things before they become symbols.
Influenced by the sensibility of wabi-sabi and the relational thinking of Mono-ha, his work explores the unstable relationship between people, cities, light, objects, and memory. Rather than seeking dramatic events, he is drawn to ordinary moments in which urban spaces briefly lose their fixed meaning.
After relocating from Tokyo to Ukiha, a historic town in Fukuoka known for its abundant groundwater and rivers, Matsuguma has been developing projects that look at rivers and stones as traces of time, memory, and movement between the past and the future. His work continues to observe the margins of everyday life, asking how places come into being: through architecture, through memory, or through the simple act of looking.
