2012-2024
I have always liked old things. I have been interested in archaeology since elementary school, and even now that interest has not faded in the slightest. From time to time I acquire archaeological artifacts that are hundreds or even thousands of years old, and I live with them placed before me. The passage of time strips these objects of all meaning and transforms their very existence into something beautiful.
Although I live in the present as a photographer, my mind is always stranded somewhere in the distant past or far-off future. The present, by contrast, has always seemed mediocre and trivial to me, and I live within it with a persistent sense of discomfort. For as long as I can remember, I have felt as though I were living a life detached from reality. It is true that I was born into this world and live upon the stage we call reality, but my feet never quite touch that stage. I remain suspended a few centimeters above it, standing there with a troubled expression.
The past and the future are always emitting a seductive light. There is the bright light of the future—the promise that technology will evolve and the world will continue to progress. That light always radiates with an almost blinding intensity. The past, on the other hand, is always dim, submerged in a vague expanse of shadow, yet every so often something flashes within it, and I have never seen anything more beautiful than that faint glimmer. It is visible precisely because it exists in darkness. Though its light is barely perceptible, it shines quietly like the edge of a flake of mica hidden in the dark.
Compared with the overwhelming violence of the future’s light, like the flash of a nuclear explosion, and the fragile beauty of the faint light glimmering within the darkness of the past, the mediocrity of the present’s light seems like some kind of joke. I am forever disgusted by the banality of the present and keep my gaze fixed only on the future and the past. I wish everything could simply become the future—or else become the past.
That will happen, quite simply, when I grow old and this life comes to an end. Somewhere in my mind, I have always regarded my own death as a final point of salvation, and I have vaguely longed for it. I wish everything would become the past. Day by day I move toward death, living through this reality that feels like a bad joke while waiting for the day when everything will have become the past.
Strangely enough, since childhood I have dreamed of my own disappearance. I want to see a world in which I do not exist. What would my father and mother do if I were no longer here? How would my friends react? Sometimes I would hide alone inside a locker in the classroom and look out at the world through the narrow gap in the door. Inside the locker it was completely dark, but the world outside, seen through that crack, was dazzling.
At that moment, I did not exist in the world “outside.” The world without me looked exactly as it always did, and at the same time it appeared strangely remote, like a world very far away. The darkness inside the locker was deeply comforting to me. My body seemed to dissolve into the dark until it felt as though only my eyes remained. It was an extraordinarily strange sensation. Perhaps that place gave me a kind of near-death experience, one in which I could temporarily erase the existence called “me.”
Inside this body lies everything I have accumulated over decades—all manner of experience and knowledge. I can tell this clearly when I look inward at my own mind and body. Packed into this body, filling every corner of it, is everything that has happened from the moment I was born until this present moment. The pure joys of childhood, painful memories, traces of wounds—they exist everywhere throughout the body. And each memory is connected to still more detailed memories, forming within me something like an entire universe of experience called “myself.”
Even when I probe deeply into it, I cannot find the bottom. The network of memory and experience inside my body is so profound, and its presence so overwhelming, that it makes me fall into the illusion that I am somehow the one absolute being. This bundle of interconnected memory and experience is always making me arrogant, as though insisting that I exist here, unquestionably and securely, in the present.
When I look into my own body, the overwhelming quantity of memory and experience contained there seems to give my existence itself a kind of gravity. And the heavier that gravity becomes, the more I mistake my own existence for something special, something great. Unfortunately, however, that gravity is basically an illusion. No one but me can feel its weight.I am always overcome by despair when I stand before the people I love.
I can feel the “gravity” of my own existence, but I cannot feel theirs. And at the same time, they can know only their own “gravity”; they cannot feel mine. In the end, I will never truly know them. I cannot escape from this skull, share exactly the knowledge and experience of the people I love, and love those things as they themselves do.
It is like prisoners confined to solitary cells confirming one another’s existence through faint sounds leaking through the walls. Communication between myself and another person is, ultimately, nothing more than a one-way cry sent from the solitary confinement of my skull toward another cell. And by the time that cry is heard in the other cell, most of it has already been drowned out by cries coming from elsewhere and has ceased to mean anything.
At some point, without warning, we realize that we are nothing more than grains of sand being tossed about in the turbulent waves of our age. We are neither kings who rule the world nor actresses and actors illuminated by bright spotlights on a stage. Within the vast flow of history, we will live lives that leave behind nothing but an epitaph.
If I were a king, I could have my court painter produce my portrait. If I were an actor or actress, my glory might be spoken of for generations. But we “ordinary” people, who leave behind nothing but inscriptions on tombstones, will never be written into the enormous book called history. We exist, and at the same time we do not exist. A single grain of sand in an immense dune. That is probably close to our true form. Our existence is desperately small. Of course, inside each grain of sand is packed an unfathomable universe of experience and knowledge, but there is no way to extract it and examine it with precision. And although the gravity felt by the grain itself is tremendously heavy, the grain is swept away in an instant as merely one particle within the dune.
This strange imbalance in perception is ultimately what drives us toward “recording.” I think that a record is, in the end, the modest wish of grains of sand that want to stop the fluid movement of history and breathe peacefully there, even if only for a single moment.
If we consider the history of photography, there is no doubt that the development of photography’s revolutionary technologies was rooted in a simple human desire. It is the desire to stop the passage of time, preserve it, and transmit it to later generations. Put even more simply, it is the powerful desire to tell someone else: “I was here.”
That desire belonged not only to the people who remained rigidly posed in front of cameras—to those who lived in an era when a clear image could be made only by immobilizing the body completely, sometimes with the neck held in place by a support—but also to the camera operators who kept pointing their cameras at them and releasing the shutter. A small attempt to write the fact that “I was here” into the enormous book called history. I suspect that photography has always been driven by this fundamental human desire.People from a hundred years ago posing against painted backdrops, resting an elbow on a Greek-style column; a bride and groom smiling in their wedding clothes—they look into the camera lens, but what they are really trying to see are their future selves, or their children, who will one day look at the photograph. They know that they will grow old. For the sake of their future selves, they fix their present appearance into the image we call a photograph. I cannot help but love this modest desire of ordinary people from the past.
There is probably no need at this point to explain that this modest desire is the spirit underlying almost all photography that is not called art. From family commemorative photographs to wedding pictures and pornography, more than 99 percent of the images ever made as photographs have surely been produced according to values far removed from the context of art. As a photographer, I gradually came to want to remain faithful to this desire of ordinary people—a desire that is sublime and yet somehow vulgar. At the same time, this means questioning the supposed absoluteness of the artistic value attributed to photographs made by photographers occupying privileged positions. What meaning can so-called art photography truly possess if it ignores the 99 percent of photographs that have been taken in the world and will continue to be taken? And are the enormous records of anonymous people, stored somewhere under dust in an antique shop, really without value?
At some point, without quite realizing it, I began collecting other people’s old photographs. Sometimes I go to antique stores here and there and buy photographs whose makers are unknown. At other times I buy them through online auctions in lots of a thousand or more. I have also accumulated a considerable number of glass-plate negatives. But this does not mean that, like a collector, I discovered some particular aesthetic value in them. In fact, I almost never sit down and study them carefully as though they were individual works of art. Most of these photographs and negatives have remained packed in cardboard boxes for years.
Every so often, however, as though suddenly remembering them, I take a few photographs from one of the cardboard boxes in the corner of my studio and look at them. There are people I do not know, smiling in places I do not know. Considering the period in which these photographs were made, there can be little doubt that the circumstances of their creation marked some kind of special occasion. The birth of a child, a reunion with friends, a happy moment at a party—the traces of joyful memories from these people’s lives remain there. Whether the photographs were artistic or not probably mattered not at all to the people who owned them. What mattered, surely, was the opportunity to confirm that their lives had been full of meaning, that their lives in this world that resembles a bad joke had not been wasted.
But this is where my imagination comes to a halt. Everything beyond that point has already been lost from the photographs. Who these people were, where they were, why and when this moment was photographed—all of that information has vanished. Naturally, there are cases in which the person who preserved the photograph left some sort of note on the back, almost as though anticipating my confusion. But whether such a note survives or not, the result is the same. Put simply, the photograph has already lost its function and become a nameless gravestone. An anonymous photograph that has lost the concrete information of story, place, and circumstance tells us only that someone existed somewhere. And worse still, even the faint trace of existence remaining in the photograph now persists in the world only dimly, as information that no longer needs to be remembered.These photographs have already died as photographs. They have undergone that sweet death toward which I myself feel something resembling a vague longing. Material that has completed its role and lost its meaning simply sits before me. An image that has shed every trivial meaning and every trivial story and become a pure crystal. Could anything in this world be more beautiful?
A photograph always dies twice. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is killed twice. The first death occurs when the shutter is released. The flow of time is forcibly stopped and fixed into an image. This death functions as a life-support system for memory. By killing a moment in time, we attempt to preserve its appearance forever. Like having the animal we killed on a hunt turned into taxidermy.
Strangely, not many people speak about photography’s second death. A photograph dies for the second time when it finishes serving as a life-support system for memory. In other words, when it can no longer be used to verify the past or communicate one’s life to another person, the photograph has completed its function.
Having lost all meaning, necessity, and story, these photographs begin to drift through the darkness as nothing more than “images.” Of course, some photographs escape this second death. Photographs of historic moments or famous figures may avoid it. But ultimately, more than 99 percent of all photographs ever made in the world—virtually all of them, apart from extreme exceptions—have already undergone this second death, lost all their context, and are drifting somewhere in the darkness of this world.
For a photographer, speaking of photography’s second death is almost taboo. This is because, for photographers, the prospect of their own photographs being buried anonymously in the darkness of history means the failure of their own lives. And like many other photographers, I too live in fear that one day I will remain unknown and be buried in darkness as a photographer. Yet there is a high probability that this fear will become reality. I will eventually be forgotten and end my life as a single grain of sand in an enormous dune. Photography’s first death brings glory and excitement to the photographer, but its second death literally drives the photographer toward death.
As a photographer, I must continue resisting this second death. It requires an enormous amount of psychological strength. If I were an excellent hunter as a photographer, capable of endlessly pursuing that first death, perhaps I would not fear the second. But reality was different. I am always afraid of being forgotten as a photographer, even though I already know how it will end.
And yet, at the same time, part of me wants to reach this second death as soon as possible. Let everything end. Let everything become the past. Then I will be freed from this reality filled with trivial meanings and stories.
Why not just hurry up and undergo the second death? Then you’ll finally be at ease, the dead photographs whisper to me. From the cardboard boxes in the corner of my studio, the sweet smell of death is always spilling out.
Perhaps it would be all right for me to die now. My photographs undergo their second death, and I undergo my death as a photographer. My photographs are released from meaning and context and begin drifting through the darkness. It is not necessarily such a sad thing. I have always sought death. The fact that I am alive now means only that, among the choices of everyday life, I keep choosing “to live” at each moment. Death fills every part of the world around my life. I merely try not to look at it.
I live two lives. There is the “me” who lives bewildered in this reality, and there is another me wearing the incomprehensible persona called “photographer.” Thankfully, even if I choose death as a photographer, my own life will probably continue in this world for a while longer. If I die as a photographer, I will finally be able to look into the state I longed for as a child—the “world in which I do not exist.” I decided to die as a photographer.
Over the course of several years, I erased information about myself as a photographer. I deleted the website I once had. I asked every site that carried my photographs to remove them. There is almost no information about me left on the internet now. At least in the space of the internet, and in photography’s public sphere, I have died as a photographer. Almost no one in my everyday life knows that I am a photographer. No one knows who I am anymore. I am nobody. I do not need to be myself.
I genuinely enjoyed the process of my own false death. It was exactly like the comfort I felt as a child when I looked out from the darkness of the classroom locker. The place where my mind could rest most easily was, after all, a place in which I did not exist. There is no need for “me” to exist. The personal story called “me” was never so necessary to my life as a photographer. Strangely enough, it was by killing my life as a photographer that I came to recognize more strongly than ever that I was a photographer.
For this dead photographer that I had become, I provisionally gave the name “H.” H is something that was once a photographer. There is no story or background there. There is only emptiness, or perhaps the trace of a vanished memory—something like what remains in a dead photograph.
" H is Takashi Honma, isn't he?"
May 8, 2017 on X
