Canon global

I wanted to feel the real world

-What part of the United States did you grow up in?

Boston, Massachusetts, which is on the east coast. It's a very academic town. Everyone lives with goals like buying a house and getting married, and it seemed to me like a virtual world. I decided I wanted to leave the country and experience the world, so fourteen years ago, after I graduated high school, I spent a year travelling all over the world.

-You travelled all over the world?

At that time, you could buy a ticket from United Airlines for two thousand dollars and go anywhere in the world, and I went to four countries and spent three months in each. I found places that would let me work for room and board. In Alaska I took care of sled dogs, in the south of France I was an artist's assistant. And then I went to Nepal and Japan. In Japan, I went to Hokkaido, and on the thirty hour-long ferry from Otaru to Maizuru I met my wife.

-After that, you got married, then. Why did you come to Japan?

After I finished my trip around the world, I went back to the States and entered music college, but when I went to karaoke with my wife's family in Japan I had heard music by Tamio Okuda which I grew to like. I had thought I'd like to play music in Japan and started living here in 2001. During that time we had a child, and in 2005 we went back to the United States, and after a year and a half, we came back to Japan.

-How did you start taking photographs?

I started painting with acrylics six or seven years ago, but even though it took me several months to complete a painting, I wasn't satisfied with the result. So I'd get a model to come, and I'd take a picture, then use that picture as the basis for my painting, but once I started editing the photos in Photoshop, I was attracted to the fun of photography. I figured I'd have to go to school if I wanted to become a professional, but I found out I could become an assistant and work and study at the same time. That's how I became the assistant at a commercial photo studio.

Identity as a Theme

-The year you became an assistant, 2007, you won the 2007 MIO Photo Award Juror's Award. What kind of piece was that?

It was a self-portrait series called "If I were Japanese." Living in Japan, I started to think about my identity. I was raised in a very white town, so when I came to Japan I became something unique, a minority. I thought it would be fun to make people think about my appearance, so I dressed up as a high school girl and a middle-aged woman riding a bicycle, and so on.

-Now, in your "1/2"(half) series, whose portraits did you take?

Just my family. My sister and her children, my mother and father, my own child. I took pictures of my own family when I went home to America for Christmas last year. I destroy the faces with Photoshop, and I figured the only people who would forgive me for doing that would be my family. The theme of "half" came about because my own child is half-American and half-Japanese. And by processing a photograph, it becomes half-digital and half-analog. There are a lot of different meanings in the word half.

-Why did you destroy the faces like you did?

I had already been altering photos with Photoshop, but once I started working as a photographer, I started to want to preserve the photo-like qualities in an image. A photograph is unlike a drawing because there is a moment when the picture is taken, and you don't have to start at nothing. First take several shots, and then choose the picture that best expresses that person. Then you destroy the face. But these works actually preserve the original photograph quite a bit. In other words, the problem here is a problem with identity. With a straight picture, you can tell if someone is a foreigner, how old they are, if they seem like an intellectual, you can see a lot. I wanted to take that and make something mysterious where people would think, "I wonder who this is."

-The eyes are quite arresting.

If I hadn't touched the eyes, it wouldn't have been abstract. When you look at a portrait, the part you look at the most is the eyes. That's why I squished the eyes to a certain degree, making it human, but not human-like.

-Mr. Nanjo said, "They are not so much simple portraits of people, but rather an expression of a universal human existence." How do you display these works?

If you look at them on a computer screen, I think they look beautiful. That's why I want to display them on both a monitor and printed out, together. I'll print them out quite large, and I plan to use the entire five-meter wall that I've been given to use. The level of impact is different when they're big. When I display them, I want it to have an installation feel. I want to give an experience to the people who have come all the way to the museum.