Butoh-Inspired Short Films and Visual Work

The Liminal Space Between Movement and Image

A note on this page: this collection sits at the intersection of performance, photography, and film. What you find here is not documentation. It is continuation.

Some things are too alive for a single frame. A Butoh performance exists fully only in its moment: in the particular quality of light, the temperature of the room, the held breath of an audience. Film and photography cannot capture that, but they can carry the trace.

These short films and slideshows are traces. They are not recordings of performances but works in their own right, made for the camera, for stillness, and for the kind of attention a screen invites. A Butoh movement that unfolds over ten minutes in a theatre becomes something different when compressed into a short film. Neither is more true. Both are honest.

The Japanese concept of ma, the meaningful pause or pregnant interval, translates naturally to film. The cut between frames is ma. The silence in a soundtrack is ma. The moment before a hand completes its arc is ma. Cinema and Butoh share an understanding: what is not shown is as powerful as what is.

Films and Slideshows

A Summer Dream – Fine Art Photography Prints & Self-Portraits

Slideshow with music

A meditation in image and sound. Fine art self-portraits and contemplative photographs are gathered into a slow, musical sequence, an invitation to pause in the middle of summer and notice what the light is doing. These images live between stillness and movement, between the composed and the found. This is photography as it connects to Butoh: not capturing reality, but listening to it.

Self-Portrait Photography Part I – Conceptual Portraits

Slideshow with music, filmed in Tampere

Conceptual self-portraiture as contemplative practice. Each image in this series asks the same question from a different angle: who is present when the doer steps aside? The self-portrait is not narcissism. It is the oldest available subject: a body in space and light, facing a lens. What remains when performance, technique, and self-consciousness are stripped away? These portraits pursue that question.

Self-Portrait Photography Part II – Lighting, Composition, and Conceptual Approaches

Slideshow with music, vertical format

The investigation continues. Part I asks who is present when the doer steps aside. Part II turns to the how: how light shapes a face, how a shadow becomes the subject, how the angle of a camera changes what truth looks like. It explores natural light, shadow play, alternative perspectives, and post-processing as interpretation rather than correction. Each image is a question rather than an answer. It will be useful to photographers developing self-portrait skills and to artists exploring visual self-expression.

Birch Trees – Ambient Video for Study and Contemplation

Birch trees paired with original music. There is no narrative and no instruction, only presence. Birch trees carry a particular stillness: white bark, fine branches, light moving through leaves. This is an invitation to pause, let the eyes settle, and let thought slow into focus. It is suitable for study, work, concentration, and quiet relaxation.

Water and Monochrome – Ambient Short

Monochrome water scenes distilled into a brief ambient film. With color removed and contrast reduced, what remains is movement, surface, and sound. Water in black and white becomes ancient and elemental. It is for study, focus, and the kind of concentration that needs a quiet anchor rather than silence.

Photography as Moving Image

The slideshows here are not passive screensavers. They are sequences, built with the same attention to rhythm, pause, and transition that a Butoh performance demands. Music is chosen not as background but as landscape. It shapes how the eye moves through an image, how long it stays, and where it returns.

The same philosophy governs all my work: less is more when the less is chosen with full attention. One photograph held for ten seconds teaches more than thirty images in a minute.

The walking films and movement shorts bring a different quality: the body in the actual environment, with uncontrolled light and the imperfection of the real. There is no studio and no setup. The camera catches what the eye notices, which is always more than we plan.

The Channel: A Living Archive

The full YouTube channel, Osku Leinonen Photography, holds an expanding collection: contemplative walking films, self-portrait slideshows, Butoh-inspired imagery, and philosophical visual essays made in Pispala and beyond.

The philosophical walking videos deserve special mention. Walking is the most ancient form of thinking. When the body moves through a familiar landscape with a camera, something loosens. The habitual self relaxes its grip, and the environment begins to speak. These films follow that process without narration and without conclusion, with just movement, attention, and the world as it is.

The Camera That Makes Creativity Possible

My photographs are made with a Ricoh GR III, a fixed-lens camera small enough to vanish into a hand and precise enough to reward full attention. For self-portrait work and movement studies, it removes every excuse not to shoot. It is always with me and needs no setup time. You press the shutter when the moment calls for it, not when the equipment is ready.

Disclosure: As an Amazon influencer, I earn from qualifying purchases made through the links below. These are tools I genuinely use in my practice.

For those drawn to this kind of contemplative, minimal image-making:

Cameras

• Ricoh GR III – 28mm, APS-C sensor, total presence
• Ricoh GR IIIx Urban Edition – 40mm, more intimate framing
• Ricoh GR IIIx HDF – built-in diffusion for soft, emotional, contemplative work

Filters for Atmosphere

• Tiffen 49mm Black Pro-Mist 1/4 – dreamlike softening, ideal for self-portraits
• Tiffen 49mm Black Pro-Mist 1/8 – a subtle whisper of atmosphere for outdoor work
• B+W 49mm Variable ND Filter – shoot wide open in daylight and add motion blur

Adapters

• Ricoh GA-1 – for the GR III (enables 49mm filters)
• Haoge LAR-GR3X – for the GR IIIx (an alternative to the GA-2)

Stability and Carry

• K&F Concept 230cm Ultra High Tripod – overhead and low-angle self-portrait perspectives
• Peak Design Everyday Sling 3L – minimal, instant-access carry

An Invitation

These films are not finished objects. They are openings. A slideshow invites you to slow down and let a single image stay longer than the algorithm suggests. A movement short invites you to notice what a body does when no one is performing.

Watch slowly. Come back. Notice what changes in you between viewings.

That is the practice.