Naruki Oshima
In daily life when we are viewing something without thinking, when we suddenly turn our eyes to another direction, or when a continuous view from, for example, a car window is suddenly broken, we can experience such visual images as ephemeral, unrecognizable phenomena: we might experience an unexpected phenomenon which we can't identify for a moment. These visual phenomena, although they don't have any concrete existence, are of specific visual reality for me.
For instance, rows of buildings seen from a train window at night appearing as a bunch of light dots floating and moving in the darkness; far mountains appearing in a car window as a green mass gradually expanding itself closer and closer; rays of dazzling of sunlight falling through a blind; or double reflections in a display window, are all examples of such phenomena.
We often try to identify these unexpected phenomena by reference to our memories of, for instance, what a building at night, a mountain or blind slits look like. This identification extinguishes the floating strangeness of the phenomena and thus they are integrated into our ordinary landscape. That is to say, the once captured visual strangeness can't continue, is ephemeral, because our way of seeing is accustomed to ignoring the strangeness and to recognizing only such images which fit into our context of meaning.
In my works I try to strengthen and maintain this ephemeral quality. I think that photography has the potential to achieve this because its essential quality enables us to escape from our ordinary way of seeing. However, as a matter of fact, many ordinary photographs around us are taken after the above-mentioned identification so that the strangeness is completely excluded. My work tries to create an image exterior to our ordinary recognition and to present the strangeness of the image in its purity, that is, by reducing or over-fulfilling the conditions of recognition in order to prevent it from being recognized and categorized. One of my methods is to break the perspectives, which is one of the requirements for recognition. I think when the optical dependency on the perspectivistic perception of the distance between oneself and others is interrupted, the strangeness of the image will come to emerge. For instance, out focusing makes the distance unstable, and by treating an image as a layer, its perspective changes into a thin layer.
When the volume and perspective of an image is lost, it appears to us just as a mixture of light and shadow. I increase this condition of unrecognizable strangeness in order to explore a new relationship with other images, which will no longer be dependent on the context of meaning. I emphasize elements such as light, color, and tactility which constitute a photographic image. That is what I call montage. For example, in the mountain pictures the green colored mass expands itself like a plume of smoke; in the sea pictures the surface of ripples swell as reflections; in the night scene series the floating gradation from light to dark renders the actual building seem almost non-existent.
I believe that the ephemeral strangeness of images shows us the basic condition of the world where images are just floating independently of any meaningfulness or valuation, of classification or integration. Of course, our world is full of readymade images, visual clichché always pre-viewed and pre-recognized. Between the objects and us there are only defined relations. Capturing and emphasizing the ephemeral strangeness means the presentation of the condition and the opening to a new relationship with the world.
(Düsseldorf April 2002)