Everywhere I’ve Loved Is Light

35mm Film Photographs

Selected images from project, 2026-ongoing

Everywhere I’ve Loved Is Light , documents Young’s exposure to a place’s specificity of light that one discovers through living there, which inevitably becomes entangled with our own history. As part of her half-Japanese identity, Elise Young’s practice is in constant conversation with komorebi, the fleeting, dancing interplay of sunlight and shadow created when light filters through the leaves of trees. Something about this suggestion of filtered light, however small, connects the images in the project. ‘An entire world unfolds in the streaming of light,’ Young muses, in her field journal, and we begin to see that unfold through her eyes — in light leaks in the corner of frames, in the fluorescent glow of poppy stems, and in shadows cast onto boat masts. All of a place can be found in its light.

The photos span St Andrews, Scotland; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Rye, NY. This project is ongoing.