Holding Still: Summer Moments at Katsura

Kyoto in high summer is heavy with heat and green. Katsura sits at the city’s western edge, beside the river it takes its name from, and stepping through its gate changes your pace before it changes the scenery.

The villa was created in the seventeenth century by two princes of the Hachijō line, and its garden is meant to be walked rather than viewed from a single spot. The stepping stones are set at a deliberate stride. They make you look down at your feet, then lift your head just as a view opens across the pond. In summer the moss and maples close in, and the buildings appear in pieces between them.

The main buildings stand on tall, slender posts, raised against the river’s floods, and from the garden they seem to hover. Their roofs are low and plain. Behind the open screens the rooms hold almost nothing, which leaves the materials to do the talking: unpainted wood, paper, reed.

Then the details. In the Shōkintei teahouse, squares of indigo and white paper run across the alcove wall and sliding doors in a checkerboard that still looks startlingly modern. Elsewhere there are painted flowers on fusuma, screens woven from bamboo and reed, and a small shelf placed exactly where the eye comes to rest.

I photographed Katsura on a summer morning in 2025. These pictures try to keep what the place asks of you: to stop, and to look properly.