The author, who has never met her grandfather, discovers his signature on the back of photographs in a family album, alongside images of him preserved at Yasukuni Shrine. Through oral accounts passed down by her father, the author pieces together fragments of her grandfather’s wartime experiences, and later locates related documents in National Archives of Australia, once again using the signature as a trace to confirm his identity. Images and archival materials produced within different systems and contexts thus form a state of memory that is at once contradictory and mutually referential.

This work departs from the shifting relationships between photographs, the body, landscape, and history, rethinking the potential of images as carriers of memory. Within the work, photographs are repeatedly viewed, re-filmed, and inverted; images that once functioned as historical evidence are set in dialogue with the landscapes behind them. The author’s body, as one who has not directly experienced this history, moves between the family album, national archives, and physical sites, becoming a medium that connects private memory with official narratives.

Through the constant movement between front and back, visibility and concealment, the work seeks to reweave layers of time that have been suppressed or overlooked. Images are no longer treated merely as tools for retrieving the past, but as mechanisms that compel the viewer to pause, to turn, and to reposition themselves. Within this continuous circulation of images and gazes, the work preserves a state in which memory remains unfixed, searching for a place from which to look.