観光客: Tourist - photos by Mark Wadley

I wanted to be savvy, culturally aware, not another white gawker standing in the wrong place at the train station. But I could never escape that simple fact, blundering wide-eyed into a country where I had never been, didn’t speak the language, and would, inevitably, show my dumb ass.

"A psychogeographic view through the lens of a cheap camera, giving a realistic look at a country that has been exoticized far too often. Glimpses of flora, concrete and steel show the familiar to the man who is unfamiliar.” - Tully K, Apocalypse Confidential

“We forget the flaneur, the only type of person who can take these images, whose wandering is in union with curiosity. A bewildered stare at a sign in an unknown language may be the act of a tourist, but finding enough merit in its design to commit it to film and share it is not.” - Cole Wheeler, WYXR’s Life on Deck

“These faded images and hazy lights evoke the fleeting nature of travel—moments that feel familiar yet distant, like fragments of a memory shaped as much by films and anime as by lived experience. It’s a reflection of a trip where the lines between the real and the imagined dissolve.” - Sam Levin, @goopcat