Photographer India Hobson and I speak across time zones. She is in Tokyo, where she has spent the past few weeks, dazzled by the colour combinations of late winter in Japan. The mountains, she tells me, are “so blue”; she has never seen colours thrown together like it before. I have loved India’s work for a long time now; she captures landscapes in the colours they are hewn from - murk and magic. She notices things that humans have left behind, unthinkingly. I often think of her when I see unexpected sunlight, trapped and stretched through glass. We have been known to exchange photographs of onion skins and compost bins, without so much of a word.
It has been almost as long since I went to Japan, but for a while I went often, and India still does. With her partner Magnus Edmondson, under their partnership as Haarkon, she released a guide book to Japan that compiled their personal experiences rather than itineraries.
In response to the TOAST Spring Summer 2025 concept, A Lightness of Being, India took these photographs during a surprisingly warm and sunny November trip to Tokyo and Kyoto, in the cities’ backstreets. To me, they are variously witty, beautiful, bold and attentive. They give me wanderlust, and they take me right back to days getting purposefully lost somewhere new.
What does it feel like when you walk past something and decide to take a photo of it?
I think I kind of collect the compositions when I'm somewhere new. I can look at something in a really different way and be quite objective about it. I have a freedom. I see something and I don't see it for what it is. Instead, I can see it for its shape or its colour or the texture. Sometimes everything is so pleasing, and it surprises me because it's got colours that I wouldn't pick, or the shape's like off, but it's just everything works.
The one of the van in the bag is making me really happy.
Those covers are always so specifically shaped that it’s like someone's trying to cover it up. It kind of tricks me and I think that it's fun. It makes a sculpture out of something that isn't. I also just really love folds in fabric, so I will be drawn to them anywhere, whether it's like curtains in a window or laundry. I really love the way that light plays on fabric. I think I also like that it's something that should be quite hard; I know that it's a van, but it looks very soft.
What I'm finding so entertaining about it is how the gathering of the fabric and the specific little pocket for the wing mirror makes it look cute.
Like it has waggly ears or something.
Exactly, as if it’s not a vehicle but a giant cuddly toy.
There’s a lot of that in Japan, I find; I see faces in stuff. And because I don’t read Japanese the typefaces become pictorial. Because I don’t have the context, I can look at something without having to read it.
One of the things I’ve found interesting in my previous trips to Japan is the balance between order and play there. I feel that your photos really capture that.
I think that it's a place that's really easily romanticised, and it's really difficult as a visitor to understand why that might be problematic. There is a lot that goes through my mind when I take pictures here, I never want to view people's lives as my entertainment. But because I do have that removal from it all, I can try to read it as a visual landscape as well. As you say, it feels like there's a lot of rules but then there is such a break from that, too. Everything has a mascot which kind of makes it friendly and feel a bit more human, and you can read that in the street.
The other thing I'd say about this collection of photos is that tonally, it's so cohesive. How does colour work for you in that way?
Colour is so important to me. It’s at the forefront of whatever I'm doing when I'm walking around. The colour combinations that other people choose are not necessarily ones that I would be comfortable having in my home or on my body, but to look at in another place, it feels so right and so unexpected. And sometimes they can only be made by the sun. The sun has done a lot of work in creating the colours of the pegs, or the patina of the background, those things you can't manufacture, it’s just time that gives you those colours.
Sitting with these photographs as we speak, I’m noticing all kinds of details that maybe took a minute to emerge. Are there things in your photographs that you only see after taking them?
I think I initially may not see something, but then if I sit with it afterwards, I will. Because I do move on like from that moment; I wander away, so I can't see everything in that scene. Also, I'm very conscious that I'm in the middle of street, and I don't want people to think that I'm weird. Photographs only ever get better with that time. And you might look back and see it because you've grown and you've changed. That's the difference as well.
You spoke about freedom earlier, and I’d love to know how that intersects with the photos you take when you’re travelling.
So I think the freedom comes from how I feel when I have taken a picture that I really, really love. It feels like I've got something of value, of worth, and I've like I've collected that. And often it’s about archiving and documenting the most simple things that are every day that are actually valuable. Life is more than just these huge, momentous events. It is also what a bus stop looks like, or a building that might get knocked down. All that stuff is so important, but you only know that it's important a lot later.
You’ve captured so much of human life in these photographs, but barely any humans.
People play a huge role in my photographs. I think that a lot of the time that they've done the arrangement: someone's covered that van up and chosen the silver cloth to cover it, and they've chosen the colour of the towels. I'm hugely appreciative of the way that someone has done something. I think that all those little details are stories in themselves.
Interview by Alice Vincent.
Photography by India Hobson.
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