The Long Summer (Extract)

Belgium

THE LONG SUMMER Disrespect Yourself The Long Summer is a photographic series composed of multiple exposures shot on film across Brussels, Paris, the South of France, Mallorca, Barcelona, Cairo and Hong Kong. The project began in March 2023, shortly after I was forced to leave Japan—my home for nine years—due to an administrative oversight. Born out of the disorientation that followed this rupture, The Long Summer becomes less a record of geography than a visual mapping of feeling. It unfolds as a hallucinatory landscape where time slips, locations blur, and identity drifts without anchor. Alongside this emotional dislocation emerged a conceptual desire: to challenge not only my relationship to place, but also to the medium of photography itself. Central to this is the idea of Disrespect Yourself—a personal provocation aimed at undermining photographic sanctity. Rejecting the pursuit of the perfect frame or the reverence for the decisive moment, I began reloading rolls of film at random and exposing them again without regard for sequence or outcome. The result is a series of wild, irreversible double exposures that willingly risk the erasure of previously captured images. In that destructive gesture lies the potential for something new: a visual language that echoes memory—layered, fractured, involuntary. A rejection of order, and an embrace of the ephemeral. Rather than clarity, these photographs seek texture. Rather than narrative, sensation. The Long Summer resists the authority of the single image, proposing instead a vision that is melancholic, mutable, and unresolvable—like memory itself.

My name is Esteban. I was born and raised in Brussels (Belgium) to a Spanish father and a Portuguese mother. The lack of a strong local identity or sense of belonging pushed me to leave my hometown as soon as I was able, to explore other environments and cultures—as well as my own identity. I lived in Barcelona, Los Angeles, Beijing, and Paris, and finally established myself in Tokyo (not quite the opposite side of the world, but almost) in 2013. Tokyo is the place that made me want to pick up a camera.