TO-FROM
6 July - 12 July 2026
A photograph has a destination.
An image doesn’t disappear when it leaves its creator. It begins another story. With TO-FROM, creative duo Kazusa Sato and Yasuhiro Fukano turn photography into an object of transmission, shaped by time, distance, and the bond between sender and recipient.
Presented at noa gallery arles as part of Rencontres d’Arles, TO-FROM is a project conceived by Japanese creative duo Kazusa Sato and Yasuhiro Fukano, in collaboration with SCHWÄR, a German family-owned buffalo horn eyewear maker known for its bespoke artisanal craftsmanship. Working at the crossroads of photography, design, publishing, and exhibition design, their practice focuses on what exists around the image: the gesture, the material, the encounter.
Made during the final three months of Kazusa Sato’s pregnancy, the exhibition takes the form of a daily correspondence. Each day, Sato chooses a single theme and photographs it in Japan, composing three images, one story told from three different perspectives. These photographs are printed as postcards, accompanied by handwritten messages, and mailed to three cities: Arles, Paris, and Sankt Peter. The exhibition presents only the postcards sent from Japan to these three destinations.
The three recipients are collaborators central to the project: the Schwaer family, the family-ownd eyewear maker in the Black Forest, Jonas Schwaer, son of the maker and a friend of Sato’s, in Paris; and Paul Wegimont, friend (of Jonas) and founder of noa gallery arles.
More than a photographic series, TO-FROM observes what happens when an image leaves its author and becomes the memory of a journey.
Each day begins with the same gesture: observe, choose, photograph. A flower. A moon. A tree. A bridge. An everyday object. From a single subject, Sato composes three images meant for three different recipients. Yet none tells quite the same story, the light changes, the moment changes, the gaze changes. Photography becomes less a capture than an imprint: of a particular day, a particular feeling, an instant that will never return.
Taken on the same day, the three images also carry the trace of their birth. The date inscribed on each acts as a mark of passing time. Even before being sent, the photograph already holds the memory of its own existence.
Before becoming an exhibited work, an image was an address. It was printed. It was written on. It was sent. Each postcard leaves Japan to reach its recipient, crossing borders with a story already underway. The photographic gesture doesn’t stop the moment the shutter closes ̶ it continues through the waiting, the journey, the instant someone finally opens the envelope.
Today, images pass across our screens without our really pausing on them. They scroll by, accu- mulate, and vanish almost immediately. TO-FROM slows this movement down. Here, a photograph is printed, written on, sent, and awaited. It regains the weight of paper, the time of travel, and the value of an object one chooses to keep.
The title TO-FROM already contains the project’s entire trajectory, a departure, an arrival, and everything that exists between the two. What travels isn’t only an image: it’s the traces of a mom- ent, the words that accompany it, the gesture of the person who chose it, and the care shown toward the one who receives it. Addressed to specific people, the photograph sheds its status as a public image and becomes something almost confidential. It doesn’t merely seek to be looked at ̶ it seeks to be received. The postcard becomes a silent letter: a way of saying, I saw this today, from here.
Made during the final months of Kazusa Sato’s pregnancy, TO-FROM resonates with a particular sense of time, that of a period spent awaiting someone’s arrival, when time is measured differently.
In the exhibition, waiting itself becomes part of the work: waiting for an image to cross borders, waiting for a postcard to arrive, waiting for it to be discovered by its recipient. This delay, often seen as a constraint, becomes here what gives the photograph new depth.
Through this correspondence between Japan, France, and Germany, Kazusa Sato and Yasuhiro Fukano turn distance into a space of encounter. The images don’t just travel from one place to another, they connect gazes, gestures, and individual stories.
With TO-FROM, photography ceases to be merely a trace of the real. It becomes a presence in motion, capable of holding the memory of its journey and extending the bond between sender and recipient.