Silver in Analog/Fine Art / 2026 / Analog / Fine Art

• Prize
  Silver in Analog/Fine Art
• Photographer
  Chie Hirabayashi, Japan
• Date of Photograph
  03.2026
• Website
  https://www.chiehirabayashi.com/

We accept the world before us as reality, but do we truly see it? Reality may simply be an image born of perception. Through photography, collage, and drawing, I explore how reality is constructed rather than recorded. Yellow paint acts as a trace of perception, gradually blurring the boundary between the visible world and our recognition of it. Developing gelatin silver prints in the darkroom becomes a way of retracing my relationship with the subject and reaffirming my presence. Rather than denying photography, this work embraces it as a record of our fragile attempt to understand existence.

［Profile］

Chie Hirabayashi is a Japanese photographer working primarily with gelatin silver print photography, incorporating collage and drawing to reconstruct photographic images. Through cutting, layering, and drawing, she explores how our perception of reality shifts with memory, time, and emotion. Rather than treating photographs as fixed records of the past, she seeks to strip away the names and meanings already assigned to things, revealing unknown relationships that emerge between fragmented images.