FRAMES Photography Podcast with Kino Seido

In today’s episode, W. Scott Olsen speaks with Kino Seido, a Japanese documentary photographer whose work explores identity and memory through the intersections of people, places, and time.

You can listen to this interview using our podcast player below, but we strongly encourage you to subscribe to the podcast in your podcast app so that you don’t miss any future show episodes.

Kino Seido is a Japanese documentary photographer whose path into photography began after studying ferrous metallurgy at Kyoto University. Rather than working with metals, he turned his attention to the fragile and layered textures of human life and memory, seeking out the subtle contact points where people, places, objects, and time intersect. His approach is both poetic and investigative—quietly attentive to the overlooked details of everyday environments, while asking larger questions about identity, belonging, and the cultural traces that shape our lives.

Kino’s work has been exhibited internationally and has earned recognition through several awards, including acclaim for his celebrated series The Strata of Time. In these and other projects, he examines the transformations of society and the environment with a sensitivity that is both personal and universal. Whether photographing landscapes, urban spaces, or human encounters, Kino weaves together images that resonate as visual archaeology—layering the present with echoes of the past to create a body of work that reflects on continuity, change, and the search for meaning.