After taking all photographs, Nishino faces in front of a large white wood panel and starts to allocate each photograph by viewing a physical map, doubling it with a map in his mind. There was a video showing the process of his creation. It was interesting to see that he creates one zone of the map at a time, flies to another zone and connects each area in the end. Not spreading widely from one area where is covered first.
Ken Kitano layered around 30 photographs of one categorized human being. The subject ranges from soldiers guarding Tian’anmen Square or girls cosplaying in anime costumes. You must have a image pops up into your mind when you imagine a typical categorized people. But when they are actually collected and layered in one piece, most of the details got blur except the face. It may be because when the one thinks and behave similar to another, their face will come to resemble each other, like husband and wife.
Kitano thinks a portrait is a apparatus by which we replace ourselves with others. It contains spontaneous possibilities allowing us to imagine the existence of ‘others’ as if it were ‘our own’ ?and should confront us like a mirror and ideally full size. That is why he printed this work in life size.
Looking carefully at the work, you will notice a shadow or body of a person captured inside. The word “portrait” is always included in Haruki’s title although it is difficult to see a human’s facial expression as a usual portrait. When I take photographs of my friend, I believe that it is a portrait of my friend. But it is ture? It was just one aspect cut off from my point of view.
Kazuyuki Soeno quote as below;
“I project a light onto things that are disappearing, intending to bring new life to the photographic paper, but after they have been dried, the prints lose their vitality.
All that is left are the dead remnants of light.”
Niwa Harumi, the curator of this exhibition, quoted as
“On March 11, 2011, reality surpassed anything that could be imagined. There must be many people for whom that day altered the meaning of photography irrevocably.
Why is that? One reason is that photography makes clear things that we tend to overlook in our daily lives, trivial things or feelings that we are unable to put into words, sensations that seem to slip away through our fingers even as we try to grasp them. The truth is, however, that it is these minuscule facts that generate and sustain our daily lives, our memories and consciousness. The medium that makes us aware of this fact is photography.”
Photograph is not a medium to cut out our visual life anymore, but to show us the ?”minuscule facts” happening here and there unconsciously. And I need artists to actually see it.
text and photo by Rasa Tsuda
Artists’ and curator’s quote from exhibition?catalogue?”elan photographic – Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.10″
Exhibition Info
Date: Dec 10, 2011 – Jan 29, 2012
Place:?Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography
Address: Yebisu Garden Place, 1-13-3 Mita, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, Japan