About

I am a documentary photographer based in Japan, where I have lived since 2014. Originally from the UK, I first came here for work, but over time Japan became both my home and the focus of my photography practice. My documentary work is primarily concerned with Japanese culture, with a particular interest in the role of ritual and tradition in contemporary Japan. I also work in design across print and digital platforms, but documentary photography remains at the centre of my creative output.

My path through photography has not been straightforward, but I have always returned to it. Over the past twenty-five years, I have moved in and out of professional practice. There have been years when photography was central to my working life, and others when I was making photographs alongside other kinds of employment, including website design, customer service, telesales, sorting mail in a post room, teaching Brazilian jiu-jitsu to children, and helping run martial arts contests across the UK and Ireland. Though life changed, photography remained constant throughout – not as a profession, but as the thing I returned to whenever circumstances allowed. I do not see those years as separate from photography so much as part of the life around it, through which I came to understand it more fully.

At present, photography is not how I make a living, but it remains an active and significant part of my life. I pursue it through the matsuri project and this website, drawing on and continuing to develop the skills that shape and support it: image-making, writing, and website design. If there is an amateur quality in that, I mean the word in its older sense: not as unserious or unskilled, but as sustained by attachment to the medium itself. What has remained constant – and what continues to draw me back – is my fascination with what photography can do: its capacity to attend closely, to hold complexity inside a frame, to register presence, and to reveal something of the world that might otherwise pass unnoticed.

What first drew me to photography has never left me. That interest began in 2001, when I was eighteen. On a rainy day, waiting for the weather to clear, I wandered into my college library and came across a small but exceptional collection of photobooks: Robert Frank’s The Americans, Richard Avedon’s In the American West, Bruce Davidson’s Subway, and William Klein’s Close Up. I had never encountered photography like that before. It showed me that photographs could be direct, searching, unsentimental, and fully alive to the world and to the human condition. Soon afterwards, I left the business course I had been taking, turned instead towards darkroom photography, and later studied at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, graduating in 2007 with a BA (Hons) in Photography.

I left university just as both the wider economy and the photographic industry were entering a period of profound upheaval. Graduating into the global financial crisis delayed the start of my professional life as an aspiring photojournalist, but the economic turmoil was only part of the story. My dissertation had examined the ways emerging digital technologies were likely to reshape professional photojournalism, and as a darkroom-based photographer I could already see that the ground was moving. To adapt meant relearning much of what I had come to know through mechanical and chemical processes – not only how cameras were used, but how digital images were made, processed, and circulated. That moment also pushed me to widen the scope of what I could do. Alongside making photographs, I developed skills in website and graphic design and in writing, becoming a more self-sufficient creative worker. Those skills went on to shape much of my life.

Living in Japan has given my photography not just new subject matter, but renewed focus and depth. I found myself drawn to things that familiarity can render almost invisible – ritual, social codes, manners, and the quiet persistence of inherited forms. I became interested in the ways a society holds itself together. Here I am drawn to the tension between old and new; to the distinction between uchi and soto – inside and outside, belonging and distance; to the pull of group harmony; and to the way values are carried through custom, festivals, and shared participation. A major focus of my work is matsuri – Japanese festivals that continue to animate public life across Japan. I am fascinated by the role festivals continue to play in modern Japan – not as performances of heritage, but as living structures of memory, participation, and belonging. Through matsuri, I have found one of the clearest ways of exploring how ritual persists within modernity, and how communal bonds and collective identity are formed, renewed, and sustained in everyday life. This remains at the heart of the work I am making and sharing now.

Alongside my personal practice, I have worked across photography, film, media, and design in both editorial and institutional settings. After moving to Japan, I joined an international events company and ultimately became its Director of Visual Communications. The role required a broad range of creative and communications skills across print and digital platforms. It took me across Asia, Europe, North America, and the Middle East, where I photographed more than 70 multi-day events and created websites and printed materials for more than 150 conferences. Over the years I have worked with clients and partners including the Government of Japan, The Wall Street Journal, the American Chamber of Commerce in Japan, University College London, Virginia Tech, Osaka University, and the University of Barcelona. My photography has appeared in publications including Newsweek Japan and The Japan Times, and I have also made fundraising films for NGOs in Japan and the Philippines.

In 2015, I became the Founding Creative Director of the IAFOR Documentary Photography Award, an international competition created to support the professional development of emerging documentary photographers and photojournalists. It remains one of the great honours of my career to have founded the award with Dr Paul Lowe of VII Photo Agency as its Founding Judge. He was someone I had looked up to for many years, and it meant a great deal to build something with him that helped younger practitioners develop their work and advance their careers. Since his death in 2024, that collaboration has come to mean even more to me. The award also benefited from the expertise and generosity of guest judges including Ed Kashi, Simon Roberts, Simon Norfolk, Emma Bowkett, Monica Allende, Poulomi Basu, Jocelyn Bain Hogg, Maria Teresa Salvati, Ziyah Gafic, and Jenny Matthews. It was further supported by organisations including World Press Photo, the British Journal of Photography, Metro Imaging, Think Tank Photo, MediaStorm, and my alma mater, University of the Arts London.

I work slowly. My practice is shaped by attention and patience – by spending time, watching with care, and trying to understand how individual lives move within larger social structures. Sometimes that means working quietly and unobtrusively; sometimes it means getting close. The camera is not only a way of looking, but a reason to be present. It can open doors that might otherwise remain shut and make encounters possible that would otherwise remain out of reach. But access brings responsibility, and one of the deepest questions in photographing people is knowing how close to get. That question of distance, proximity, responsibility, and understanding remains at the centre of how I work.

Now, in my forties, as I return to photography with renewed seriousness and share new work, I still think of myself as a student of the medium – still trying to understand what it can and cannot do, within the confines of the single frame, across the longer form of the photo essay, and within the limits of my own capacity and vision.

Text and images copyright © 2001-present, Thaddeus Pope. All rights reserved. No unauthorised use, reproduction, distribution, or publication without prior written permission.