Your website is called Abandoned Realities. What is your interest in isolated spaces and the absence of people? I don’t believe in portraiture as it always involves a conscious pose. Even when we dress in street clothes we are aware of how we will be seen by others. I prefer to focus on places where traces of human activity have been left in an unpremeditated or unconscious way – traces that speak of the place and its inhabitants in a more sincere manner. Nevertheless, the overall title of my projects, Abandoned Realities, is not to be taken in a literal sense but rather in a broader way. Photography as a medium, and how society uses images generated by that medium, are to me the most important aspects implicit in the word ‘reality’.
What do you hope to evoke for the viewer? Japan is a very complex society. As I understand it there seems to be a violent contrast between the urban and modern and the traditional and natural. The idiosyncrasy of nature is venerated in all aspects of Japan’s culture: religion, food, folklore, the arts and so on. Nature is closely linked to its traditions, yet at the same time this is offset by the cosmopolitan
You have a day job as a graphic designer. Many artists struggle to find time for their art. How do you get that balance right? There are always conflicts, but also many positive aspects. Having a day job greatly limits the time I can dedicate to my photographic projects, but it also imposes a certain distance, and longer periods in which to develop a project. The time span allows my view of a project to shift over the course of weeks or months, and to become more reflective. Nonetheless, I’m slightly obsessive about my projects and they are always on my mind.
foam magazine # 28 talent
‘I do not believe I am making documentaries about places.’
How did the project Views/Places come about? I always try to begin with everyday spaces, approaching society through small details. That is why I assign the generic term ‘places’ to my images. In all my series I try to avoid direct references to the place. I am not interested in documentary aspects, as they breed prejudices. I do not believe I am making documentaries about places. Nor do I believe that an image can summarize an entire place or the character of its inhabitants, although it can reflect some meaningful details. I delve into the formulas a society uses to represent itself – how communities see themselves. A society’s historical artistic manifestations are a reference, but I do not assign any particular importance to photography as a medium. I am referring to artistic, popular or cultural manifestations as a whole, including literary self-references.
interview by Anne-Celine Jaeger
city in a duality that generates a conflict for its inhabitants. And this conflict – not in the pejorative sense – affects activities, as well as internal behaviour and social relations. It is that conflict and duality I want to bring out in this project. Can you tell me about overlapping images in your work. In Views nature bleeds into the cityscape and in Portraits you have layered portraits on top of each other. Photography has been assigned an anthropomorphic configuration that is not necessarily appropriate. Reality is more complex. That is why, in Portraits, I avoid simple or anecdotal posed portraits, using instead a variety of registers to configure the complex reality of the sitter. I am not afraid to break the ‘window onto the world’, a concept generally associated with photography that I don’t really buy into. In Views, I am exercising a greater visual license. I believe that overlapping generates a conflict in two senses: in the idea of contrasting two opposing images, and in the medium of photography itself, with its classic representation as a self-referential image. It even manifests the physicality of the photograph as its own reality, rather than as a mere representation or register of something.
236
How does your graphic design background influence your work? It helps me see a great variety of things and perhaps allows me to be more open when formalizing a project. Or maybe it allows me to get outside the project when editing it, approaching the edit from a less emotional point of view. How does an idea evolve into a project for you? There are two main threads that I find fascinating: societies, with all their complexity, differences and characteristics and the medium of photography. I am looking to merge two elements: the exploration of human presence in society and the photographic medium with all its complexities. It usually takes me one or two years to get from the initial idea through proofs, photos and editing all the way to the end of a project. It means that I sometimes lose some spontaneity, but that doesn’t bother me. What is your main source of inspiration? How a society relates to images in general, and the role, use or importance it assigns them. Current visual arts, of course, but most of all art history, because in the end, each period or style is a formal manifestation of the society of its time, a selfportrait in the broadest sense. I should also mention photographers who have dealt with photography’s ontological questions and who have become direct references for me, particularly Stephen Shore, Wolfgang Tillmans, Thomas Ruff, Roland Fischer, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Paul Graham. •