Though Photographer Hal takes his moniker from the artificial intelligence character of the same name in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, there are not too many similarities between them. Whereas the sentient HAL 9000 becomes wholly untrusting of his human peers, ‘trust’ is a fundamental component of Hal, the photographer’s, work. Over the course of his career, Hal has dedicated his time to photographing couples – couples he often approaches in bars in his hometown, Tokyo – with the aim of capturing a sense of their love for one another. In his early series, Pinky & Killer DX, Hal invited couples to pose as if they’re inside a purikura (a Japanese photo booth in which the photos are printed onto stickers with effects added over the top). Later, Hal moved his couples to the bathtub and captured the ways in which his (often clothed) subjects arranged themselves in such a contained, small space. Naturally, Hal has also photographed couples pressed against the transparent plastic door of washing machines, but it is his various Flesh Love series that take the idea of capturing a couple’s intimacy to another level. 

In Flesh Love, Hal vacuum packs couples in custom-sized plastic bags; their shrink-wrapped bodies carefully positioned in a way that captures the unique bond that defines that couple’s love (no vacuum-packed couple will be the same). It’s here that trust really comes into being in Photographer Hal’s work. Approaching strangers – again, often in bars – to invite them to be photographed in an oxygen-free environment is a big ask. Working with assistants who help arrange a couple into position, Hal has mere seconds to take one or two shots after the vacuumed subjects have been sealed up before reopening the bag. I ask Hal where the concept for vacuum packing couples comes from, to which he replies that new ideas always come from previous work. “It may be close to the process by which manufacturers improve their industrial products,” he suggests. And indeed, over time Hal has updated his own formula; in Zatsuran, couples are photographed in and amongst their possessions. It’s interesting to see the extent to which ‘stuff’ can shape the personality of a particular couple’s bond – a love of music could be characterised by a collection of vinyl records or, say, guitars.

In Flesh Love Return, Photographer Hal places his sealed couples amongst other settings, whilst in Flesh Love All, his subjects’ possessions are also wrapped in plastic. The result is a series of beautiful images that raise questions (namely – “how?” which is answered below), but also of what the material and built environments around can say about love. At its most intimate, Hal’s work shows how love can exist in the absence of anything else, but as humans, we instinctively build stories and connections with one another amongst the objects and environments that surround us. That’s something that, no matter how sentient he may have been, HAL 9000 could never understand.