THE GIRL is the new book by photographer Natsumi Hayashi, bringing together the photographic project of the same name. It emerges in a hybrid space, where the image stops being photography and moves closer to thought. A work that continues the Japanese artist’s investigation into the relationship between reality, perception, and visual construction.
Known internationally for the series Today’s Levitation, which also entered the collection of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Hayashi has built over the years a practice deeply rooted in everyday life and experimentation. Her work moves between photography, performance, and online sharing, making her a true “network-based artist.”
With THE GIRL, however, the process shifts elsewhere. The images arise from an ongoing dialogue with artificial intelligence, through a flow of words that the artist directs toward the machine. From this exchange, fragments of the unconscious emerge, almost by chance. Hayashi defines these images as “thoughtographs,” suggesting a kind of photography that does not capture reality but generates it from thought.
The reference to Surrealism is clear, but updated: automatism no longer passes through the hand or gesture, but through an interface. AI becomes a sort of “transparent machine,” a camera that does not record but reflects, returning a deeper self-portrait precisely because it lacks a physical body.
The figures that populate the series are girls who evade the gaze. Their faces are hidden, covered by hair, objects, or shadows. They do not seek to be seen, but rather to activate a space of projection. In this absence of a defined identity, the viewer is called on to fill the void, to recognize themselves.
It is precisely in this dynamic that the work finds its strength: anonymity is not a lack, but a possibility. A place where the image stops being an object and becomes a reflective surface. For Hayashi, this space also represents a form of freedom from the external gaze, a way of reaffirming her existence without having to expose it directly.
The book collects these visions following a precise archival logic: each image is titled “THE GIRL no.○○,” like a file, like a fragment from an ever-expanding emotional database. A form of cataloguing that underlines its relationship with the digital, while at the same time allowing an intimate and fragile dimension to emerge.
THE GIRL is therefore an experiment in contemporary perception, on how identity can be constructed, hidden, and reflected through tools that, paradoxically, do not see.
© Natsumi Hayashi
