Literature

For me, many of the journeys I have taken have always involved traveling through the skies. Whenever I board a plane, I invariably choose a window seat, spending as much of the flight as possible gazing at the world below. In the land visible through breaks in the clouds, the lives of people—living in places far removed from my own—are undeniably unfolding.

Each time I travel by air, I feel that observing these landscapes is what truly defines the beginning and the end of a journey; it is, in essence, what constitutes a "journey" for me. For about a decade, I have been capturing scenes from an altitude of approximately 35,000 feet. What appears in these images are fragments of the earth—belonging to someone, somewhere, at some point in time.

By combining these fragments at random and weaving them into a single composition, I have created a new landscape: the "skin of the world." What emerges is a map of personal memories, accumulated alongside my own travels—yet, at the same time, it is an "invisible globe" that exists only within the imagination, one that none of us can ever truly hold in our hands. - SOHEI NISHINO