Offline - Casper Kent’s Polaroid Portal into Intimacy and Fantasy
What does it mean to truly disconnect? For Casper Kent, it’s not a retreat from the digital world, but a quiet rebellion against it. His latest project, Offline, is a decade-long journey captured through Polaroid photography. It’s a project born not just from a love of imagery, but from a need to explore the places where fantasy and authenticity collide—and where human connection thrives.
Kent’s lens found its muse in the hushed, shadowy corners of love hotels and isolated ryokans. These spaces, free of daylight and the digital hum of online life, served as blank canvases for unguarded moments. In these settings, where walls bear secrets and the air is thick with stories untold, Offline came to life. The result? A hauntingly beautiful collection that feels both deeply personal and universally resonant.
“Is a polaroid not the perfect visual medium on which to paint a memory?” Kent asks, as if inviting us to consider the alchemy of this analog art form. “Soft, imperfect, and abstract… created in the moment without imposing on it.” Each Polaroid in Offline seems to breathe, living somewhere between dream and reality, blurring edges in a way that digital photography simply cannot. The images are artifacts of time, slowly fading yet eternally vivid in sentiment.
The project kicked off with an exhibition and book release in Tokyo at Contrast Gallery in Shibuya. The 136-page book is as tactile as the Polaroids it contains.
Offline is a reminder that the most vivid connections often happen away from the glare of digital life. And in a time where being “connected” is often synonymous with being “online,” Kent’s work urges us to reconsider what it really means to connect—softly, imperfectly, and authentically.
Murakami’s colorful motives return to Louis Vuitton.