In spring, 2019, while photographing a man playing with the birds on the Santa Monica pier, Tokyo, Japan-based photographer Yota Yoshida was reminded of a photograph he had taken several years back. In it, his daughter stares at a bird through the window of a hotel. With his series, “The Imaginary Birds,” Yoshida thinks of “how pleasant it would be,” if one of the birds on the pier was the same bird his daughter had observed. “Then I imagined the bird tracing its way through the places I had been from that day to this day,” he explains. “Surely the future was there then.”

See more from “The Imaginary Birds” below!