May 14, 2026.
Nakanoshima Rose Garden in the early morning.
I had wanted to photograph Nakanoshima Rose Garden first thing in the morning, on a cloudless sunny day, when no one was there.
This morning, I woke earlier than planned.
When I looked outside, the sky was perfectly clear, without a single cloud.
I immediately headed to Nakanoshima Rose Garden by taxi using GO.
Although it was still early in the morning, it was not completely empty of people.
Even so, this became one of my finest photographic collections of Nakanoshima Rose Garden.
Above all, the feeling of the morning light was beautiful.
It took time to remove the people who appeared in the frame, but the number of people who needed to be removed was far smaller than usual.
For that reason, I was able to take many photographs with the compositions I truly wanted, without being overly concerned about people entering the frame.
Had I arrived just a little earlier, I might have taken even more perfect photographs.
That is something I may consider on another clear morning from tomorrow onward.
This time, the work consists of 367 photographs.
The total running time is 36 minutes and 42 seconds.
In other words, each photograph is shown for six seconds.
Even though only a few people appeared, the time required to remove them exceeded the time spent shooting.
In that sense as well, my photographic collections are quite labor-intensive works.
Today, throughout the shoot, Wagner’s overture to Tannhäuser kept playing in my mind.
At any rate, the Osaka Philharmonic Orchestra’s Matinée Symphony concert on May 12 was truly magnificent.
Still filled with the afterglow of that concert, I composed this early-morning Nakanoshima Rose Garden work as a single visual poem.
For this work, I used the pieces from the second half of the program, in order.
At the end, I added Bizet’s “Minuet” from L’Arlésienne, which had been one of the pieces in the first half of the program.
The order of the music is as follows.
Humperdinck: Prelude to Hansel and Gretel.
Mascagni: Intermezzo from Cavalleria rusticana.
Puccini: Intermezzo to Act III of Manon Lescaut.
Mussorgsky: Dawn on the Moscow River.
Wagner: Overture to Tannhäuser.
Bizet: “Minuet” from L’Arlésienne.
The audio sources were selected from performances publicly available on YouTube.
Many of them are by Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic.