Wakaba Noda was born in 1984 in Fukuoka, Japan. She went to Sweden as an exchange student while in high school — “I saw very nice Astrid Lindgren movie when I was little and so I was always interested in Sweden”, says Noda — and since 2006 has been a photography student at Gothenburg University. After graduating from there this summer, Noda plans to return to Japan.

The above work is taken from Noda’s “Blink”, a series of diptychs. This series was given an honorable mention by famed critic Kotaro Iizawa at the 2006 Canon “New Cosmos of Photography” competition. About this work, Noda says that she “tried to make the physical body reaction (blink) into a photographic image. To blink is something that we can not really control. (Of course we can blink intentionally.) I wondered and visualized what I am missing in the little moment when I blink. So that is why I used two pictures to show a little difference and moment between there.”