Kyoto Alone

• Prize
  Honorable Mention
• Photographer
  James Bollen, United Kingdom
• Date of Photograph
  2018 to 2023
• Studio
  jameshbollen.com
• Website
  https://jameshbollen.com
• Instagram
  @jameshbollen

Kyoto Alone is a series of photographs blending the city’s gardens, historical architecture and surrounding nature together with some of their geometrical and seasonal patterns. It’s also partly a prequel to an ongoing project I’m working on about Chinese and Japanese calligraphy, which the fusuma and shoji doors in Kyoto’s temples and other buildings are an influence on. Some of these doors also feature in the project, which was published as a book in November 2025. The front cover’s gold colour and the title’s indigo font are references to Ogata Korin’s painting Irises.

I studied modern and classical Chinese at university in London. I'm a self-taught artist who also publishes books under my own imprint. My most recent is Kyoto Alone, which was released at the end of November in 2025. I also publish See You, an ongoing series of photographic portraits of women living in cities taken in a DIY style. The third edition, See You, Taiwan Special, was published in 2024, and a fourth edition, See You, The Tokyo Issue, is due to be published later this year.