Nakano is a photographer born in 1994 and based in Tokyo. His practice centers on the construction of narrative through photographic sequencing. While studying Film and Media at Musashino Art University, he developed a fascination with photo editing, discovering how photographs could be linked together; much like a word-association game, to create complex narratives. In 2018, one year after graduating, he won the Grand Prize of the 18th 1_WALL for a project addressing tensions within his family following his coming out. In 2021, he received the finalist at the 44th Canon New Cosmos of Photography, selected by Ryan McGinley, for a series of photographs exploring the longing for physicality after he was involved in a traffic accident during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the 5th Fugensha Photo Award in 2025, Nakano was selected as the winner from among 183 applicants through a public review process. Over the following six months, he developed the project into a photobook published by Fugensha.

"Spin around the Night Consumed by the Fire" originated from Nakano’s discovery that the notorious murder from the 2000 —a “gay-bashing” incident at a cruising spot, which shared the exact same name as himself. For Nakano, who identifies as gay found himself haunted by the story: when he learned that a heterosexual man had murdered a gay man there, he imagined the victim’s ghost still wandering the park, searching endlessly for men. From this image emerged a project in which Nakano assumed the role of a medium carrying a camera, embarking on a “quest” to release the trapped spirit of the deceased.

As he walked through the site of the crime and researched the events surrounding it, the chain of associations evoked by the incident expanded endlessly in his imagination. Interviews led him to stories about graves, which in turn brought him to photograph illegal dumping grounds for gravestones. He also photographed the bodies of heterosexual men illuminated by flash in an Edo-period stone quarry. Nakano describes experiencing a gradual weakening of oppositional relationships: between the reality and the imagination, the life and the death, the self and the other, the heterosexual and the homosexual. The resulting images are in a violet tonality reminiscent of ōmagatoki — the witching hour.

Beginning from a single incident caused by human desire, Nakano’s “journey” resists efforts to categorize the world into fixed and easily understood divisions. By walking along unstable and indeterminate borders, he takes a rich sequence of images that embraces ambiguity. At the same time, the project attempts to grapple with the unknowable nature of human — a vessel filled with desire, emotion, and memory — through the medium of photography.

The photobook was designed by Aaron Nieh, one of Taiwan’s most celebrated graphic designers. Under his direction, Nakano’s journey has been transformed into an experimental 248-page volume, alongside two written texts by the photographer.

P.S
The title is originated from Latin palindrome “In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni”.