You might wonder who is behind this blog. Well, my name is Tina Bague. I am from Barcelona and I moved to Miyama from my beloved Barcelona at the very end of 2019, just a few weeks before Covid blocked the entire world. By the way, I was born in 1974, so you can make your numbers if you want to know my age…
Since I started working as a freelance photographer in my twenties, I have traveled all over the world. Touring the world, discovering new cultures and new places is something I inherited from my parents, I guess. Since my siblings and I were little, we would travel all over Europe with our parents by car, listening to different languages, trying new food, enjoying the unknown!
In 2001 I met Toru, a Japanese documentary photographer, who would become my partner and eventually, after sharing a million crazy adventures together, my husband. I visited Japan for the first time in 2002. My first pictures from Japan, still shot in film, were published in different magazines in Spain and abroad. Since my very first trip to this country, I felt in love with its atmosphere. I had traveled a lot before but never to such a photogenic country. It caught my full attention. Every corner, every person, every gesture. I think I have never felt so trapped (in photographic terms) by any other country.
Toru moved to Barcelona in 2004 and we spent 15 years living together in the city, both working as freelance photographers. During all those years we traveled to Japan together almost every year, capturing the essence of the country through our lenses, each of us in our own style and personal point of view. It was thanks to this way of traveling and documenting Japan together that our first photo project together was born.
In 2010 we left our lives behind and hit the road, to document Japan for a whole full year. The Japan Photo Project has probably been one of the most exciting things we have ever done together, but I will talk about it extensively in another post. For now I will only tell you that we traveled all over Japan with a motorhome (sponsored by Nuts, a camping car company in Kyushu, to whom we will be forever thankful!). A 365 day project that would end up changing our lives forever. Not right away, but it slowly shaped our future without being aware of it…
Without The Japan Photo Project, most likely we wouldn’t be living in Miyama right now and Casa Miyama and Koya Miyama wouldn’t exist either!
Don’t forget, your choices shape your life, choose well!!
Tina
