“Membrane,” Japanese photographer Karen Sato’s remarkable photobook of landscapes and still lifes (in the widest sense of the words), is the result of more than fifteen years of photography. In her short afterword, Sato writes that “Images move back and forth through time and space, passing through the boundary I call the self, and both the subjects and I continue to change.” Behind her haunting, sometimes abstract images lies an awareness that, even if photography may strive to capture the world “as it is,” photographs are inherently filtered through a meaning-giving process, and that it is impossible, even with the mechanical reproduction of the camera, to depict a pure “outside.”
 
“Sato’s work evokes the concept of ‘liminal space,’ which has gone viral on the internet since roughly 2020, the year of the COVID outbreak, and has stirred considerable debate […] From the considerable number of examples of liminal space presented in the book across times and places, it becomes clear that ‘liminal space’ is more a property of particular situations than of special locations. Put differently, if such a situation arises, any place can become a liminal space […]”
 

From Minoru Shimizu’s essay “Chlling in the Limen: Karen Sato’s Photography”