Luca Bailey - ‘Wanderer’

2025 - Tied Over Press

Design by Emi Takahashi
Photography by Luca Bailey

First Edition - 50 books

Wanderer is a photographic series born from a period of emotional dislocation, a time when walking became less about joy and more about searching for something lost. Created during two separate periods in Japan, the work began unintentionally. The images emerged from long, aimless walks that became quiet acts of escape and reflection in the midst of growing personal tribulations.

What began as purposeless movement gradually revealed itself as a deeper search: for belonging, for stillness, for a sense of home - for all the things that felt missing.

During these solitary walks, one recurring figure kept reappearing: a lone raven. It crossed my path again and again, like a shadow, a witness, a double. At the time, I often found myself daydreaming about seeing the world from another perspective. Much of my view was from above, through the window five floors up, from the balcony overlooking the trees in the park.

In Japanese postwar photographic culture, the raven holds layered symbolism: a messenger, a mystery. The Japanese term for “wanderer” (旅烏) can also be interpreted as “bird of passage,” a phrase that seemed to describe both the raven and myself, two separate beings drifting through the same landscapes, unseen and searching.

This book is about that search, a quiet journey shaped by absence, longing, and the effort to see through another’s eyes.