I saw the exhibition of Morishita Daisuke, the winner of the 2006 Konica Minolta “Foto Premio” Annual Award. During the same period, an exhibition of his new works was being held at Shinjuku Ganka Gallery, a short walk away. Although I remembered that I had seen Morishita’s works on his website, the exhibition showed a different aspect to me.
It can be said that Morishita’s images have a good grasp of the characteristics of photography as a medium of pushing three dimensions into a flat surface, the characteristics of the materials used in the act of photography, the characteristics of film, lenses, and photographic paper, and the objects he photographs. The exhibition also allows viewers to experience the sense of the image that Morishita showed us, which makes us think again about the basic point of photography, which is to look at a flat surface. Standing in front of these meticulously detailed works, Morishita’s intentions permeate the entire screen, and I feel compelled to look at them carefully.
As soon as you enter the Konica Minolta’s exhibition hall, you are confronted with a print taken in a dense grove of trees. You are looking at the tree in the center of the screen, across the lawn from the overgrown trees. Or we are looking at a grassy square, with two trees separating the side of the picture from that square. There are several trees, and depending on which side of the screen you are looking at, the image looks two ways, depending on which side you choose to base your viewing position on if you want to say you are looking at the brighter side. What you see in front of you is a flat picture, but its black and white arrangement is combined in a planar way, making it look like overlapping of layers. However, when you look at it again, it is just a plain, ugly plane.
There is also an image that Morishita used in September 2006, and again in this exhibition, as a postcard guide. Standing underneath two viaducts, looking across the parallel, straight viaducts, the piers of the viaducts are not the same as those of the other two. The piers of the viaducts are arranged regularly. The viaducts are only a few feet apart, so you can glimpse over the viaducts. The only thing is that the rays of light shine into the interior of the viaduct, that is, into Morishita, who is photographing it, but it is slightly tilted. It is a simple structure if we imagine and explain the three dimensions in this way, but the line of light that enters the viaduct and enters the ground, and the line that disappears in front of the viaduct to the other side, form a straight line in the picture, which divides the picture into two parts. The light that enters the picture shows a slight texture by reflection and gives expression to the concrete. The screen, which is nothing more than the repetition of a simple structure, is riveted by the behavior of the light, giving rise to a new interpretation of the image, away from the space we might imagine. The medium that captures the scene in front of us by means of optics is freed from the situation in front of us and gives rise to a new interpretation of the image.
This becomes even more complicated when the object of photography becomes transparent or reflective. In recent years, some buildings have been fully covered with glass, walls and ceilings have been finished, and acrylic panels and mirrors have been used extensively to make spaces that might otherwise appear closed and small appear as large as possible.
In such a small space, Morishita presents the world as he sees it. He points the camera at a street that stretches out in a straight line from the height of a pedestrian deck or a pedestrian bridge. Buildings rise up on both sides of the street all the way to the other side. The pedestrian street is separated from the carriageway by neat tiles, and streetlights stand on both sides of the sidewalk. The building and the street are exquisitely placed around one side of the streetlight. Centering on the so-called vanishing point, the building, the sidewalk, the roadway, the other side of the building, and the sky can be roughly divided into five parts: the building, the sidewalk, the roadway, the other side of the building, and the sky, and if the vertical line is extended based on the vanishing point, it can be roughly divided into six sections. The building on one side is partly glazed, reflecting the mirror image of the miscellaneous buildings on one side. At first glance, it appears to be a cluttered and trivial townscape, but as you look at the image little by little, what should have been a three-dimensional area is made into a flat surface, and this flat surface is appropriately organized and divided into quadrants. Further, the quadrants come to echo each other and come to rest again as a single plane.
Other images become more intricate and enjoyable to look at. Glass and mirrored surfaces both reflect and transmit the environment. By reflecting the environment, the environment, which is not in our sight, is first lured into the image. The glass refracts the lured image in one direction and reverberates it in another. It is obvious that photography is materially flat, but the material left as an image on this limited plane is richer than we can imagine, and as I look at the image, the material itself on the plane and the regular, linear, complex, rich overlap of material, makes me question whether this is the way I should look at the image. It is as if the visitor is made to stand still for a moment to check the composition of the image, and then directed back to the image, and at the same time interpreting the image, the work repeatedly questions the viewer’s thoughts.
This also extends to the exhibition method itself. The prints are arranged in a linearly symmetrical fashion, with the right-angled wall as the central line. When we stand on the extension of the central line to look down on it, both prints are reflected by the framed glass, and they echo each other. Although not all of the works in the exhibition are the subject matter of this exhibition, the development of each print stands on its own, but they also echo each other through the exhibition. The composition of the work is to present these images, but also for us, the viewers, to experience them. It is not intended that the images are meant to reflect each other, but it is an experience to perceive something in one’s mind as one’s own sense of it. At Shinjuku Ophthalmology Gallery, the images could not be hung directly on the wall, they were suspended by wires, but because the base surface became unstable and the echoes of the images were no longer constant, they seemed to be floating like paper. Since the experiences that I am seeing are not fixed somewhere, could it be said that this work is a concrete presentation of a scene that I have stored in my memory, in the form of a photograph?
This is just my own opinion, but it may be precisely because he intended to do so that he gave this work the title “Harmonic Rainbow”. In other words, the act of looking at something, which would be a process of converting a material into a noun, such as glass, encourages us to become aware of the act of listening and hearing and to repeat our thoughts by looking at the image. It seems to me that he is trying to question our senses about the rhythmic motion and the way the images resonate with each other, which cannot be obtained by simply looking at the object in a casual manner. By the way, some of Morishita’s images of water surfaces, in which wind blows, waves rise, regular waves, and ripples are expressed in subtle tones, maybe his attempt to imply such rhythms and echoes in his pictures. The images reflected and refracted in many planes are controlled and converged into one harmonious image. This may seem a simple task, but if there is a situation of overlapping or a curve, it is not easy to express its smoothness in two-dimensional monochrome tones. On the contrary, as in the case of the photograph of the viaduct, it is necessary to have a clear plan to use the contrast between black and white to give the image a thicker look, to discard what needs to be discarded, but not to destroy it, and to control the details within the image. Morishita’s images are presented to us without exaggeration and without excess or deficiency. Not only the act of photography but also the editing process in the development of the image clearly present the plan and the action. In addition, the
–The left hand is used to feel an object, while the right hand is used to estimate the reality of something that does not exist. By absorbing these two movements into one body, fluctuation is created.
Fluctuation does not have any purpose. It just desires, amplifying or diminishing, modulating.
The words displayed in the exhibition hall further impress us with Morishita’s actions: “The fluctuation has no purpose. Morishita uses words that appear to the sense of hearing to grasp the situation as the subject matter, and his intention to impress the subject matter to the viewer through sound and images by means of visual images, and to act on it, is briefly presented. We are not looking at a photograph visually, but rather we are aware of the process of grasping it from the viewer’s memory in front of the image, and in presenting a plan, it is not an active appeal to the viewer through various expressive techniques, but rather an understated yet fully presented one. When the restrictions of photography as a medium, which can only quote space and can only be flat, are not exaggerated or twisted, and the images can be presented freely, perhaps photography can be established as an autonomous medium.