ヤギュウ ショウ

Based in Ise, Mie Prefecture, I work as a photographer and creative director. I take photographs of my family, the people close to me, and the everyday scenery within arm's reach, presenting the work through exhibitions and zines. So far I have made "Gomen ne" (I'm Sorry), a photographic work that examines the distance between the ideal self and the actual self as it surfaced through my relationship with my wife, and "BUBBLES vol.1," a zine of philosophical inquiry that takes death as its starting point to explore the boundary between life and existence.

[Photobook] Gomen ne / A4 / 28 pages, full color / previously released [Zine] BUBBLES vol.1 / modified A5 / 24 pages, monochrome / previously released In addition to these two, I also plan to exhibit a new, as-yet-unreleased photobook that I am currently making.

I am always thinking about the future, and before I know it I spend my time with my heart somewhere other than here. What gently pulls that self back to the "now" in front of me, and reties my connection with the world, is, I think, the act of taking photographs. And yet a photograph, from the very instant the shutter is released, is already receding into the past. What is captured there is not only the subject, but also a faint trace of the fact that I existed in that time, in that place, gazing at the world. The reason I gather it all into a single book is that I want to preserve the flow of thought and time that a single photograph cannot hold, as a sequence of images and words. You turn a page, pause for a moment, then go back to the previous page. A book has a margin, a space in which each viewer can face the work in their own time. The texture and weight of the paper, the tones of the printing, right down to the binding. To be able to give my thoughts a body through all of these things, that too is one of the reasons I choose the form of the book. For me, making a book is not a means to convey finished ideas efficiently. It is, I think, the act of feeling my way toward emotions that have not yet fully become words, and questions I cannot quite explain even to myself, borrowing the forms of photographs, poems, and stories. The information on a screen keeps flowing past, endlessly updated. A book, by contrast, remains in someone's hands as a single object, and continues to exist, surely, even in some time I will never know. To leave a trace of the fact that I was here, thinking, gazing at the world, is why I go to the trouble of making the form of a book.

Iga is the place where I spent the three years of my high-school days. Look one way and there are mountains; look the other way and there is the sea. For me, who grew up taking such surroundings for granted, the scenery of Iga, ringed by mountains and with no sea in sight, felt at the time somehow out of joint. Though it lies within the same Mie Prefecture, it remains in my memory even now as a place with a sense of time and distance different from Ise. Back in my high-school days, I was not yet making photographs or books. I wanted to bring the words and perspectives I did not have then, in the form of the books I am now making, back to the land where I once lived. This is at once delivering my work to a new place and revisiting, as the present self, the place where my past self once was. By handing over a book in Iga, I hope to create a single connection between the sense of unease I felt back then and who I am now.