Canon global

I feel like this year the old "digital vs. analog" discussion has died down a bit. I don't know if there is any point to it or not, but maybe people have finally begun to accept that we've entered the digital era. However, the biggest problem with digital photography is when you think about what can be done when you go to retouch a photo, the possibilities are so vast that what was good about the original photograph can be lost in the process.

For me, this series is a single idea that came from a long process. I destroy the original photo, but somehow I want to let the goodness remain. I like taking pictures of people, but when you're taking a picture of a person, that person is giving something to you, and I want to value that. That may not come across in my work at first glance. Not one of the people whose portraits I took said they like the work, but there's nothing I can do about that.

These works make the viewer think about the problem of the existence of human beings. It has a similarity to artists such as Giacometti and Francis Bacon. I wonder if the making of an image of a body disintegrating connects to a doubt about the existence of humans. The act of marking up the face has an element of violence, and it could be said that the destruction of recognition itself is going on here. On the other hand, the eyes of the portraits are very strong. The strength of the eyes becomes the strength of the pieces themselves. They are not so much simple portraits of people, but I get a feeling that he tried to express a sort of universal human existence in the pieces.