Kit Rees
Photography
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Kaizen/Iwakan
Kaizen / Iwakan is a dos-à-dos photobook pairing image and poetry to explore two sides of a healing journey. Rooted in the natural world, the work reflects parallels between human experience and nature’s cycles. Together, the books contemplate stillness as stagnation and as peace.
Iwakan traces the visual texture of bleakness. Its imagery evokes an absence of life, warmth, and movementl. Through its sequence, an arc from despair, to faint defiance, to a fire lit in rebellion against the dark emerges.
Kaizen—a Japanese term meaning “continuous improvement”—offers a softer reflection. The first poem’s pening lines read as; “I have found a quiet joy in myself lately”, carrying warmth, and a sense of renewal.
Images from Iwakan reappear in Kaizen, marking what has been transformed; glimpses of Kaizen within Iwakan hint at hope not yet realised. The two coexist as mirrors of one another, two states of becoming, bound by memory.
If you would like to view a full sequence, please click the title below!
‘Evergreen’
‘The Limitless Inferno’
©Kit Rees 2026