For me, taking pictures is about documenting something. My experience as a photographer started when I was shooting at a small club in the middle of a corridor in a subway station in Kyoto. That was 25 years ago. Since that time, I have been documenting what happens in front of me.
Perhaps the most important difference between the photography and art is that photography must always rely on reality. A drawing on a white canvas is always born of the artist's free will. However, a photographer does not have a white canvas. What lies before him is an imperfect and distorted world of reality. With no doubt, a photographer can capture something beautiful in front of perfect lighting and a perfect background. However, the photographer's pursuit of his own ideal in this way cannot beat the freedom of a single line that an artist draws on a blank canvas.
Photography is always accompanied by reality, in other words, memories. It is a very private thing. Looking back the history of photography from the 21st century, it is clear that the photography has existed as a kind of memorandum to record personal experiences rather than as an aesthetic creation.It is a human instinct to record the moment of one's own experience as an image, and whether or not the photograph is beautiful is only a secondary product. Try going to a thrift store and looking at the old photographs they have for sale. There, you will find a huge amount of family portraits which don’t look very beautiful, and landscape images with no idea where it was taken, all recorded and left behind. This is a clear indication that the main function of the photographic medium is to evoke memories. What is even more surprising is that the memories are not even passed on to the next generation. These old photographs sold in thrift stores represent the last of photography, which no longer serves even as a memory-transmitting device.
There is an instinctive thirst to record, and inverted, there lurks the fear of forgetting and being forgotten. We take pictures so that we will not forget and so that we will not be forgotten. In reality, however, a photograph is like a potion that instantly evokes our memory, but it does not record the memory itself. No matter how many signs the photograph transmits to our brain to evoke our memory, the memory itself fades away. In the end, the perfect reproduction of memory that we try to obtain through photography is doomed to failure. Perhaps we feel some kind of sentimentality toward old photographs because we already know the deep sadness of their failure.
I was interested in the relationship between the evocation of my personal memory and the decay of my memory, through the act of taking and looking at photographs. I wondered how the recording of events that appear in the world in which I live, events too small to be remembered, would affect my memory. What do these photographs remind me of? And how will I forget them? I decided to take "photographs to forget. Ordinary, everyday moments of my life. Moments without drama. Documenting moments that do not need to be remembered, can really function as "photographs"? After several years of shooting and fixing on film, these photos were once put into a quiet sleep.
These photos are already coming up on 12 years since they were first taken.These photos, forgotten for 12 years, stimulate my memories, but their details are already lost. Some of them, I don't even remember if I took these photos by myself. At the same time, however, these photographs, which are losing their concrete meaning, have begun to radiate a different luster than when I saw them twelve years ago. After 12 years of oblivion, I will share these photos with others. And observe what meaning they acquire after they are forgotten.
