Brendan George Ko invites us into his world not through grand narratives, but through what feels like shared reverie. His photographed scrapbooks are poetic journals—carefully composed visual diaries where leaves, landscapes, and fleeting faces carry the weight of memory.

Having split his time between Toronto and Hawai‘i, Ko’s life unfolds across landscapes and seasons. His visual practice embraces the in-between: the foliage spilling across torrents of film grain, the half-lit portraits that feel spiritually charged, the slow breathing of a place remembered. His images are less about formal perfection and more about conjuring the emotional resonance of place.

In Moonless Night, Ko continues a deeply personal tradition: translating his experiences into a new chapter of his scrapbook series each year. This iteration is suffused with motion and stillness—from remote forest trails to roadside vistas, from red sands to fleeting shadows. He describes it as a means to revisit selves past, preserving tiny landscapes of belonging and loss in equal measure.

A defining project in his practice is Moemoeā, inspired by his time aboard the ancestral voyaging canoe Hōkūle‘a. Through both photography and video, he documents not just a journey across water—but the intimacy of shared ritual, navigation rooted in stars and stories, and a living bridge between cultural memory and reclaimed identity.

When Ko photographs, he speaks of chasing spirit, not surface. His color palette—digitally bright yet emotionally saturated—echoes darkroom familiarity, and his images often shimmer with an almost unreal clarity. He channels oral traditions and ancestral landscapes into each frame, drawing the viewer into a space sacred, silent, and softly charged.

Above all, Ko’s work reminds us that photography can be a vessel for wonder, ancestry, and self. His scrapbooks aren’t just books—they’re invitations to listen to the land, the quiet spirits, and the pulse of life captured in a moment that time might otherwise forget.