Canon global

Experience gained at the local cable television station

-Tell me how you got started with photography.

When I was in high school, I loved the comedy duo Downtown and I wanted to become a comedian myself, so I went to Osaka and got a pamphlet from NSC (New Star Creation.) But my mother begged me to get a diploma from a trade school, so I gave up on that idea. I chose the Japan Institute of Photography and Film in Osaka. Kayo Ume and Masashi Asada are both from that school, and it has a very free school spirit.

I loved TV so much that I had wanted to become a comedian, so I chose to study film. When I was in my first year, I had to learn photography as the basis of film, so I had a lesson where I had to take snapshots and then develop and print the film. I loved how the image would gradually appear on the photographic paper in the darkroom, and that was when I started taking pictures seriously.

-What did you do after you graduated school?

I worked for a little under a year in a studio at a large advertising firm in Tokyo. I had heard I'd get to do portraits, but I was taking pictures of stuff every day from morning to late at night, and I could only get two or three hours of sleep per night. I couldn't keep up my strength and I felt like I was going crazy, so I quit and came back to my parents' house in Yamaguchi.

My parents paid for me to go to school, so I didn't want to wind up doing work in an unrelated field, and the local cable television station was hiring, so I started working there in 1999. I did everything from shooting, to editing, to writing news stories. I really appreciate the experience I was able to have there.

I want to take pictures of vibrant people

-In 2003, you won the Japan Institute of Photography and Film Incentive Award at the Ueno Hikoma Award photo contest. Did you often submit entries to open calls like that?

Yes. This was my fifth time submission to the New Cosmos of Photography contest. Last year all my photos were of people with happy expressions.

-This time, the thing Mr. Araki praised most was how you have an exceptional degree of love for people, and you take pictures of them looking beautiful and vibrant.

That's because I'd rather take pictures of good things rather than nothing but dark subjects all the time. This time with "VIVA WOMAN," I thought that women over sixty who were still working were really admirable and I started taking pictures of women at work. First, I approached a woman in her sixties who works at a hotel lounge that I frequent, and asked if I could take her picture.

-Has she seen the resulting work?

Yes. I use a digital camera, so I showed her what I'd taken and we communicated about it. I took her picture in the lounge, and we decided to try a shot of her smoking a cigarette, and I was able to easily take some pictures of her that had a light sprinkling of theatrics thrown in.

-Why thirty subjects?

I decided to blow up the pictures to zenshi size (457x560 mm), and I figured the maximum number that you'd be able to take in at one go in the exhibition space was about thirty pieces, so I took thirty portraits. My subjects are women, so I talk sweet to them as I shoot.

-Do you talk to them about their life journeys as you take their pictures?

Yes I do. For example, one woman around the age of sixty who was a dog groomer told me that she'd seen a foreign film with a woman who was a dog groomer, and she fell in love with that job and moved to Tokyo. At that time, there were no female dog groomers, and she apprenticed under a man. She didn't take a single day's holiday, and even on the day there was a gas explosion in her house she bandaged herself up and went to work. She told me she'd groomed the pets of famous people such as singer Hibari Misora and the president of a big construction company. I was surprised to find out that there's such a remarkable person living in little old Nagato, which has a population of just 40,000.

-What are your future plans?

Actually, I quit my job at the cable television station this March. Since I started taking pictures for this project in February, I've started feeling confident that I could make it as an artist, and I've decided to put all my energy into making my art. I felt as if I'd get buried if I didn't escape from the cable television station.

-Do you have any artists that you want to try and emulate?

I know it's ambitious, but Mr. Araki. He's my favorite artist, and I was so happy that he chose me. When I was twenty, I saw "Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey" (Shinchosha) and I burst into tears. Until then I'd always seen him as an erotic photographer, but then when I saw that, I realized that he's also brimming with love.

-Please tell me what you're planning to do next.

When I market myself, I'm really going to market hard. And I also want to continue making artwork so that I won't be forgotten. Right now, I'm taking pictures of the staff at a Nagato tourist hotel and submitting them to the local newspaper. I've also started taking pictures of women of each generation, from age zero to ten, from ten to twenty, and so on, doing things they enjoy for a series I call "Field Guide to Women." At some stage I'd like to become an artist who is exhibited worldwide.