Upcoming | Alicja Dobrucka

Alicja Dobrucka. 'I like you, I like you a lot'

Welcome everyone! A new year has begun and Wallflower is thrilled to provide a sneak peak and video interview of Alicja Dobrucka's upcoming exhibition "I like you, I like you a lot" as our first post of 2013. We are looking forward to this and many other fantastic shows.

The London-based Polish photographer draws her inspiration from her home country Poland. In her artist statement she explains:

“My work is mainly about the familiar, known from direct experience. I’m a diarist, I work intuitively, photography, documenting comes to me naturally. I don’t glamourize reality, a certain raw quality to the work.

I’m interested in the journey - the conversations that need to happen for the work to develop. As an artist its very important to me that the work can move and be understood by people,  audiences not only from the fine art world but also the ones who have no knowledge of critical theory."

'I like you, I like you a lot' is a project about family and grieving and began once Alicja got news that her brother had passed away. The work opens up the personal space of mourning to broader affects and poses questions about vulnerability, youth, motherhood, and domesticity. Alicja's camera later returns to central Europe and her brothers youthful group of friends in a small urban-rural locality, as they find their way to a fuller, more mature, life.

Photo Set | Ghost Notes

From the opening of Robert Canali's Ghost Notes with Geoffrey Pugen. Exhibition runs until October 17.

In Conversation | Robert Canali

Robert Canali's work will be opening at Wallflower on Friday September 14 from 5-7pm,. As with previous shows, we asked Canali a series of questions about his work, his music, plans and the exhibition.

Mr. Canali, you make primarily photographs but also sculptures and installations. You are in a band – Grounders and have been discussing video with me. Any other outlets? And how do they all come together, if at all?

  

My creative pursuits are not necessarily linked by any premeditated reason or purpose, but rather represent an evolution. It always begins with an idea and from there I try to source the ideal format to facilitate that concept. For example, I came to photography as a sculptor; I only started shooting because I wanted to understand how the camera worked. It was in my research of the camera and its workings that inspired my photographic work. The same can be said for my place in the band: I one day decided I wanted to learn how to play drums, so I saved up, bought a kit, and taught myself to play. Just as I had taught myself how to use a large format camera I taught myself rudiments and rhythms on the kit. It has often been throughout the learning process that some of my most successful work is made. I find the mistakes along the way to be the most exciting moments, for it is in those instances that I can respond to what I am doing and filter a response. This can be said to describe most of my pursuits in life. I am never consciously aiming for all of my ambitions to come together in one way or another because each act, though unique, is an extension of myself.

The images featured in GHOST NOTES are all connected but the viewer may not get this at first, can you elaborate on that connection (feel free to drop some science)?

Aside from all of the work being photographic there are several links between each piece in the show. For starters the works share a certain aesthetic, one piece informs the next whether it be through colour, shape, texture or size. These formal elements ground the body of work and make it whole. In addition to the look of the work, each photograph was conceived of the same subject. The backdrop for the work is Western Canada - Banff National Park and rural Alberta. There I found landscapes that revealed themselves as sculptures. I treated the geometry of these monuments as a painter would pigment on their pallet. There isn't really a need to reference any science to describe the relationship between the subject matter in the work. Figurative or abstract, they all come from the same source, the mountains. The black and white works act as an index, suggesting a foundation or background from where the rest of the work evolved. The geodes are minerals I found while traversing these landscapes and the more abstracted images are actually macro photographs of light shining through paper-thin sections of those very minerals. The work comes full circle in a way, panning in and out on the same object, showcasing it in ways that make it seem possible for that object to be more than it is, or something it could never be. It is these possibilities that I am after in this work and in all of my work.

  

Your sculptural work is very photographic and it seems, in some sense, to pay homage to analogue technologies, how did it begin? Presuming it came after photography.

  

The sculpture you're referring to, Vessel, was created quite spontaneously. It began as most things do, with an idea and a sketch. Though it may not reflect this in its polished finish and construction, it all came together quite organically. I'm glad you sense its reference to analogue technologies, as the inspiration was definitely photography and the tools that engineer the craft. I wanted to make something seductive that spoke to the ephemeral aspects of the medium and the practice.

Can you tell us a little more about the title GHOST NOTES? 

The title Ghost Notes is actually a term used in music theory to describe a note with rhythmic value but no apparent tone. This was brought to my attention while learning how to play drums. Imagine if you will, tapping lightly on the surface of a table and every so often tapping once a little harder while maintaining the same tempo. The result is a pulse that lays under the beat, a ghost in the rhythm. Similarly the work in this show accents facets of these landscapes that are embedded within them. The title is also fitting as it describes the work regardless of the term’s technical definition. Some of the imagery harkens back to a dead era of photography. With this work I strived to take what the since departed masters of black and white photography achieved, and transition it into a contemporized form using novel techniques and modern philosophies.

  

Like prior exhibitions in the past, I have asked you (the artist in the main space at Wallflower) to choose a video piece for the Projection Room that would work with your own project. Can you give us some thoughts on Geoffrey Pugen’s ROCK and how it relates to your photographs? Connections are obvious but it would be good to hear if you have anything to add.

  

What I find most captivating about Pugen’s work is the way his piece reveals the subtle nuances of a rock. In his video the surface of the mineral shimmers and reflects light as stunning little spectrums amidst a sea of black. As the camera circles, these revelations come and go, fading in and out of focus. This effect spoke to my practice, reminding me of my process while making some of the work in this show. Positioning and repositioning minerals on light tables, waiting for the perfect angle to present itself. The moment when the inanimate object came to life, boasting magnificent colour and depth.

Have you been to Death Valley?

  

No but I am dying to go...no pun intended.

Tell us something about the art scene in Toronto?

  

It may lack the rich history and vibrancy of Paris, Venice, New York or Berlin, but in its humility and youth it certainly has its own voice.

You also told me this project has come to an end – what’s next?

  

Allow me to rephrase that; "come to an end" sounds too definitive. Let's say I have benched this work for now to pursue more current curiosities. As of late I have moved away from the camera, as I have made most of my work about what happens inside of it. I have been experimenting with a variety of camera-less photographic techniques as well as devising some of my own. The results have been exciting so far. I can say this without giving too much away, the work does not read as photo as much as it does painting or illustration.

Any questions for us?

  

What music were you listening to while installing the show?

Well, I think we'll be listening to some Squarepusher, a touch of Aphex, Black Moth Super Rainbow and possibly some Autechre if the mood takes us.

Canali's show in the main exhibition space will run until October 17. 

www.robertcanali.com

www.groundersmusic.com

Image: "Drumheller" Robert Canali, Archival Pigment Print, 40"x50", 2012

In Conversation | Shigeru Takato

Shigeru Takato’s "Televisions Studios" & "Our Elusive Cosmos" will be opening Friday July 13 from 5-7pm. In anticipation of the exhibition, we asked Takato a series of questions about his experiences, work, and current research.


You are a Japanese photographer, well-travelled, and now living in Germany; has this all come about through your practice?

I used to think that I travel to photograph.
Now I think that I photograph to travel.

In the exhibition for Wallflower you are predominantly showing work from the “Television Studios” series, which is an extensive body of work. When did you begin this project and what was your initial concept?

I started this project 2001 when I was an art student at Auckland University in New Zealand. So it has been over a decade since I started it. It is interesting that you ask what my "initial" concept was. You guessed it right, I have changed the concept or rather the way I see the works since I started the series, although I still photograph TV Studios exactly the same way as I started.

I remember when I was a little boy back in Japan, I was always curious to find out what was behind the sacred altar whenever I visited a shrine. "Is that really where god lives?" This curiosity combined with an irresistible impulse to poke my head in highly forbidden territory stuck in back of my head for all these years. At the beginning of the series I wanted to photograph them like the scene of a crime. I mean, not in the negative sense that the TV media is criminal, but the TV studio as a place which is mentally and technologically charged and draws a lot of attention. I thought (and I still think) that photography can reveal or trigger something other than what we already know about the place. I wanted to photograph the place, which was to be scrutinised to the smallest details. This was my initial drive for the series.

After finishing my Bachelor of Arts in Auckland I had a chance to study in Germany for a year. There I continued the series. As my stay in Germany was extended, the series continued within and beyond Europe. Now it is in my 10th year in Germany. As the series started to grow, how I look at the work has also slowly developed in other directions. I started to see, for example, political agendas and regional colours of different TV stations. Now I predominantly photograph news studios, which I feel are more charged with human energy (certainly no more game or cooking shows). Perhaps I became clearly aware of this change when I was in Paris 2004.

On the 9th of November 2004 after negotiating with the personnel for permission to photograph, I was sitting in the news studio of France 2 (see attached "Paris I 2004"). The perfectly shining empty news set was ready, not for shooting but for broadcasting a breaking news that could fly in at any second. Everyone in the news editing room was anticipating updates from where Yasser Arafat was hospitalised with a critical condition in Paris. I was looking at the sacred news desk which was certainly a highly charged electrode that kept away anyone who dears to approach for 4 hours. Then I was allowed to photograph it as the updates came through that he still held out. On the next day I was in a different part of the city for a left-leaning independent TV station, who six months after the start of broadcasting via Eiffel tower, was banned by the media authority due to its inappropriate content. At the time of photographing, it was pirate-broadcasting locally within a radius of 1 km from the studio (see attached "Paris lV 2004"). The next day on the 11th of November Arafat passed away in the hospital.

When I left New Zealand for Germany in 2003, I did not think of carrying out a photographic survey of TV studios of the world but now I think it is essential as the TV media is a global phenomenon and it is my stance and persistent attitude of keep photographing and dealing with this giant phenomenon, and that hopefully shows through my work.

As curator I was keen to juxtapose the news studios with another work (as you have done in the past), especially a landscape as I think all of your projects relate to the landscape in some way, be that obvious or subtle. Can you elaborate on the work Las minas de San Jose –Test Site #2 that also features in this show?

“Las minas de San Jose - Test site 2 2008” is a part of a series called "Our Elusive Cosmos". The series shows different landscapes on Earth whose histories relate to outer space / cosmos. This particular place, Las minas de San Jose is on a Spanish island of Tenerife in the Atlantic Ocean where the European space agency tested their prototype Mars-rover in 2005 whose real version was supposed to be sent to the planet in 2011. The series is similar to TV studio series in the way that the event or story belonging to the place is absent and only the surrounding that witnessed the event is present in the photograph. I want the viewers to imagine the event and want every corner and detail of the photograph to be scrutinised as a proof.

My all-time favourite photographs are ones that the astronauts of Apollo missions took with hand-held film cameras on the surface of the Moon. Until the Americans landed in the late 60's the lunar landscapes were untouched, in fact untouched for the last 4.5 billion years. Every time I look at the photographs I am fascinated to look for the missing 4.5 billion year gap. Nowadays the NASA's three roaming Mars-rovers continuously send pictures of the surface of Mars to us. I am often amazed by how the Martian landscapes look very similar to ours here on Earth. It is certainly imaginable why Las minas de San Jose was chosen for Mars-rover test site (apart from the fact that Tenerife is a famous holiday destination). I sometimes cannot help being sceptical about the digital technology that can easily create images or suspecting conspiracy theory that the Americans photograph them on a desert somewhere in Nevada. Again I find myself fixed on the surface of photographs fascinated to analyse into details to clear my suspicion.

You have referred to the studios as “science-fiction spacecraft control rooms”, which could be literally read that all our news is presented to us by aliens! Globally we rely on these spaces of information transition as a form of (almost) addiction; regardless of whether they present false or factual information. Presenting them to the viewer empty, I would think, encourages the viewer to not only reconsider what we are being told, but also, how we are receiving this information. Recently you reconstructed a news studio through projections at Kiosk 24 in Germany which was more of a public installation. Is your underling pursuit with this work to question the validity of both images and the media?

The crazy cult of TV media but yes I must admit that I am addicted to news that comes out of the TV studios! It is almost like soap opera for me. I have my favourite news anchors and reporters. They behave like actors (especially if you look at CNN international, they present themselves much like the Hollywood actors), I also see other characters like politicians and football players. I am not cynical. I mean, if I sit in front of a TV and just consume the information, how can I perceive it as truth? But I must also admit without the media I have no idea what is going on beyond my vicinity. Probably that is why I sometimes get out of my living room to travel and see with my own eyes. Of course, I do not and cannot witness most of things first hand presented by the media but I it is my desperate measure to at least be there and witness it where the news is churned and sent out from.

I really like how you say it, ".. to question the validity of both images and the media" This installation was done with wallpapers pasted on the walls, the floor and the column within the exhibition space. You have to stand at a certain point preferably with one eye to be able to see perfectly undistorted image of an empty news studio in 3D while the exhibition room itself remains also to be an empty space. I wanted to emphasise that the media has a potential to be one-sided or biased in telling their stories. At the same time the room look like a real TV studio but constructed only with wallpaper on which the image was printed. It was really the first time where I created a work that criticised the media. This was the time when the uprising of Arab-Spring (I do not like how the media named the event) was dominating the news. The work really posed me a question about documenting something and fair judgement of it.

I am sure you are aware of the writings of Paul Virilio? I am a big fan of his theories and think they a pertinent to your work especially in relation to speed, imagery and technology. In Virilio-esque fashion I have googled a few very random and open-ended quotes from the WWW. Do you care to respond to them, any others or the work of Virilio in relation to your photography?

“The speed of light does not merely transform the world. It becomes the world. Globalization is the speed of light…” - Paul Virilio

I was not aware of Paul Virilio. Thanks for bringing my attention to it. I may have touched on his area in my last answers.Television stations send out their electromagnetic waves called TV waves, which travel as fast as the speed of light.

In 2006 I was in Buenos Aires. I was in the reception area of channel 13. I had an appointment there to ask for a permission to photograph.

I had a small portfolio with me, which comprised of about 20 TV studio photos in clear sheets. The personnel who I was talking with asked me if he can take the portfolio up to the director to show him and see if the permission can be granted. 20 minutes later he came back with it and told me that I can photograph their news studios. They had three news studios in the same building! He told me the TV business is very lucrative in his country. Anyway, after the shooting was done, I was on my way back to my hotel sorting out my bag in the subway. Then I noticed that the photographs of my portfolio file were in a different sequence and some of them were upside down. I figured out that they must have photocopied the photographs to study for their new future studio designs. I thought I was on the observing side, documenting the TV studios and the media as a photographer. By revealing TV studios of other parts of the world, I suddenly found myself in a middle of globalisation process.

"There are eyes everywhere. No blind spot left. What shall we dream of when everything becomes visible? We'll dream of being blind.” - Paul Virilio

"…dream of being blind" sounds like meditation.
"…everything becomes visible"... I think people themselves want to be visible. They tell others about themselves. Facebook, Twitter, self-documenting films and photographic works etc...
I am still resisting such things though.
I still want to be invisible behind the camera.

“The field of vision is comparable, for me, to the terrain of an archaeological dig. To see is to be on guard, to wait for what emerges from the back-ground, without any name, without any particular interest: what was silent will speak, what is closed will open and will take on a voice.” - Paul Virilio

I find this passage beautiful.

I think if there is silence, imagination / a voice will take up the gap and start telling stories.
Having said that, I don't know if silence can be heard these days. So many things are visible and everywhere.
You got to be loud to be heard.

Finally, many photographers I speak to these days don’t like to discuss methodology for varied reasons – but anyway here goes: technically you are a very traditional-type of image maker (which I respect), you use a large-format camera, shoot film, make analogue type C prints and even retouch them yourself. Is this important and/or related to the work or just personal working methodology?

Computer-based image making offers too many options to me. If I start using this technique, I could never finish my print. I simply cannot handle it. If I use the same film, the same paper and the same way of making photographs, then I know what the results I can expect. I know these days photographers compose their pictures on the computer screen and some of them (well at least in Germany) would like to be called an artist not a photographer. For those artists, who know how the picture should look at the end and work towards it, computer is perfect. In my case, I usually place my camera and photograph what is in front of the lens. My post production process is simple but time-consuming retouching, which I wish were much more simplified like the stamp tool in Photoshop!

Oh and any new projects you can tell us about? I know your soon returning to New Zealand…

I am spending a week in New Zealand, then I go to Indonesia to travel and photograph for a month.
The next new work will be a series of erupting volcanoes.
I am still drawn to energy concentrated places that bear stories (news) to tell.
This time the subjects are big and loud.

http://www.shigerutakato.de

Photo Set | Lost and Found


Lost and Found Project: Family photos swept by the 3.11 East Japan tsunami opened at CCP Melbourne Thursday 31st May and is being exhibited until July 15 before coming to Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura. 

There are three posters available for sale through CCP which each have different prints of photographs and information explaining about the volunteer group “Memory Salvage", the Lost & Found Project, and about Yamamoto.

On their website the crew from Lost and Found explain about the initiation of the poster appeal:

Our plan is to collect donations for the people of the town of Yamamoto from the Exhibits. We decided to sell posters when a friend of mine commented that he didn't know how much he should give since he’s not accustomed to charitable giving. We thought buying posters is an easy means for people like my friend to make a donation. 

We hope to bring the exhibit to many locations, and in order to make this a sustainable project, 70% of proceeds will be donated, and the remaining 30% will be used as an administrative fee, such as the cost of printing and travel. Other than selling posters, we have a donation box set up at the exhibition hall. The money raised by the donation box will be all donated.

You can also donate directly through http://lostandfound311.jp/en/#donation. The money raised will go through the local NPO, Yunihuri-Miyagi to be used by the Residents’ Councils of the temporary housing in the town of Yamamoto. There are 8 temporary housing locations, in many cases, the heads of the Residents’ Councils are paying the necessary administrative expenses out of their own pockets. Donations for Yamamoto-cho can be made using credit cards starting at appx: $13.10 AU (1,000 yen)

This project to bring Lost and Found to Australia was initiated by Munemasa Takahashi and Hiroshi Hatate in Japan and Kristian Haggblom from Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura.

Lost and Found Project:  Family photos swept by the 3.11 East Japan tsunami will open at  CCP Melbourne  tomorrow May 31st at 6pm before coming to Wallflower Photomedia Gallery in Mildura.

This powerful exhibition displays damaged and orphaned family photographs retrieved during the clean up efforts following the devastating tsunami in March 2011. About 750,000 photos were collected from the rubble and volunteers for The Memory Salvage Project have cleaned, digitized, numbered and returned at least 20,000 family snapshots but some were too badly eroded to ever be identified.

In  New Yorker's Photobooth, photographer Munemasa Takahashi speaks of the exhibition and why the images are so moving:


After the disaster occurred, the first thing the people who lost their loved ones and houses came to look for was their photographs… Only humans take moments to look back at their pasts, and I believe photographs play a big part in that. This exhibit makes us think of what we have lost, and what we still have to remember about our past.


The Aperture exposures blog  also had an extract from Aperture magazine issue 206 , where photography critic Mariko Takeuchi writes:

In the cities, towns, and village affected by the disaster, a vast number of personal photographs were salvaged, pulled from underneath rubble and mud by all sorts of people. They were discolored by saltwater and covered with dirt; some were misshapen or even emitted foul odors. With very few exceptions, it was impossible to identify the people who had made the photographs, their subjects, or their owners—if indeed they were still alive.

This exhibition humanizes the troubling abstraction statistics and death tolls and generated world-wide interest and a Discovery channel special . Thousands of these abstracted images have been assembled into this powerful and visually stunning travelling exhibition.

Press | Sunraysia Daily | Heather Lee "Made In England"

Heather Lee’s current show was covered today, Wednesday 23^rd May by the Sunraysia Daily, the exhibition is up until June 13.

Wallflower Photomedia Gallery | Open Monday - Friday 10: 00 - 5: 00 & Saturday 12: 00 - 4: 00

5022 9542, 41 Deakin Ave, Mildura, VIC 3502 manager@artsmildura.com.au

In Conversation | Heather Lee


This is the first in a series of interviews which we will be holding with the artists exhibiting at Wallflower. Heather Lee's solo show "Made In England" will be opening this Friday May 18 from 5-7pm. In anticipation of the exhibition, we asked Heather a series of questions about her past work, current research and its relation to the new show.
  
Heather Lee completed a Bachelor of Visual Arts (Honours) in 2008 and is currently studying a Master of Arts in Interpretive Writing through Charles Sturt University. Since 2004, she has been involved in numerous group exhibitions including most recently, the 2010 Fremantle Arts Centre Print Award and the 2010 Swan Hill Print & Drawing Acquisitive Award. Solo exhibitions have included Ovah!, 2008 and Some of it was cricket, 2009. The conceptual basis of Heather’s art is strongly influenced by her research into sports' sociology and the way Australia's historical foundations have permeated through to the present time. She works across various media including printmaking, sculpture, and digital printmaking.

For your honours project through La Trobe uni you made a performative/site specific work on a cricket pitch. Can you tell us a little about it and does it relate to your newer work? 

The installation on the cricket pitch was comprised of 20 metres of silk fabric fixed at each end of the pitch but unattached between the creases on the pitch. On the day of the installation there was a slight breeze which picked up the silk, tossing it about as though the fabric were marking the flight of a cricket ball as it is bowled in a match.  For me the effect was surprising but pleasing as I wanted to highlight the constraints that cricket, with is associated rules and traditions, can impose particular social and cultural values on those who play it.  Although the flight of the ball may vary according to individual bowling actions, the start and end points are predetermined by the construction and marking-out of the pitch.

In addition to this, you made a sound work that was beamed out of the Historical society in Mildura for Palimpsest #8 "Collaborators & Saboteurs" can you elaborate on that piece? 

Being a sound installation, 'Mary's Oratorio' was a departure from my usual work and therefore was somewhat of an experiment.  The aim of the work was to recognise Mary Woorlong of the Kulkyne Tribe, her story and link it to my personal experience of living at the edge of the Woorlong Wetland (an extension of Kings Billabong).  The wetland is a remarkably rich ecosystem which, unlike Kings Billabong, has not been artificially regulated.  By installing the recorded sounds of Woorlong Wetland at the Mildura Historical Society who have a picture of Mary Woorlong in their collection, I hoped to conceptually bring past and present closer together.

You are known for your abstract scans and large scale prints, many of cricket balls. Can you hint at what you are up to for Wallflower and more specifically, how photomedia is incorporated? 

I can reveal that the work will be ball-less, but can't guarantee there won't be any cricket references.

A topic of ongoing debate between myself and a friend (you know who you are JB) is whether my work is classed as 'photography' or 'printmaking'.  I'm for the latter. My background is in printmaking and I see my use of scanning technology as a form of digital printmaking above all else.  As with the printmaking process, the result of my scans are only revealed to me when the image appears on the screen - the equivalent in traditional printmaking would be lifting the paper after putting a plate through the press.  Unlike photography, scanning does not allow you to see the final image prior to capturing it.

Hand Made Perfection I (detail), 2012

Your work seems to incorporate concepts that intersect local history, indigenous history and sport. Is that what you are looking at presently? 

The sociology of sport and the way the colonialism persists through the traditions, rules and intrenched values of cricket continues to intrigue me and inspire my art.  Through this central premise I find myself exploring numerous paths which, often obliquely, relate to my personal experiences and family history.  At this stage, I feel I've only just touched the surface of this investigation and as those who know me would say, I always seem to be able to relate everything back to cricket.  Scarily, I think I'm a bit cricket obsessed.

Can you expand on your role at Mildura Arts Centre and your curatorial studies?  

My role at Mildura Arts Centre (MAC) is that of Acting Gallery & Heritage Coordinator.  Despite the fact that the galleries are closed while the new theatre is being built, there has been huge amount of behind the scenes goings-on including everything from exhibition programming, digital documentation, archiving and conservation of artworks, as well as the ongoing task of liaising with heritage advisors and contractors regarding the conservation management plan for Rio Vista.  There's also the paperwork, paperwork, and more paperwork that somehow seems to multiply itself as soon as it hits my desk.

I'm full-time at MAC, but am also completing a Master of Arts in Interpretive Writing via distance education with Charles Sturt University Wagga Wgga.  Although this is a Masters by coursework and two of the three subjects are fairly prescriptive, students have the flexibility to propose their own research topic and complete a major piece of writing (10,000+ words) relating to art curation, exhibition, biography or publication.  My research is on early European responses and visual interpretations of the landscape of the Murray-Darling region of which Mildura is a part.

Heather Lee's exhibition "Made In England" will be at Wallflower Photomedia Gallery May 18 - June 13 | Opening Friday May 18 | 5-7 pm



Detail | Tomoaki Makino 



Tomoaki Makino "Soap Opera" #22



For the conclusion of Tomoaki Makino's show we have a special two part interview about his work and experiences creating his series "Soap Opera", a record of middle aged women in New York. 

Provided is the original Japanese statement and a translation.

１

僕がおばさんを撮影し始めたのはなによりも身近な母親の影響である。
母親の趣味や嗜好が当時、もちろん今もだが僕から見ればとても奇妙に感じられた。
それは買ってくる物であったり衣服であったり選ぶインテリアだったり
若い世代からみたら「奇妙だと」思える文化だった。それを僕は「おばさんカルチャー」と呼んだ。
おばさんは価値観を若い頃とは異なるものに独自に進化させ、深い世界観獲得している。
ホームセンター花柄の布を買ってきてコラージュして壁に飾ったりするだろう。
もちろん良い悪いということではない。それが人生である。

1

It was the because of the influence of my mother, more familiar than anything, that I began to photograph ladies. When the hobbies and tastes of my mother surrounded me, of course those days felt very strange.

"Strange" When there was something to buy, when it was clothes or the interior design to choose or was seen from the young generation, there was a culture which could be considered. I called it the "lady culture."  A lady evolves a distinct sense of values when young that are original and specific to themselves. From this view-of-the-world, acquisitions are carried out.

She will buy cloth with a home-centre flower pattern, a collage will be carried out with it, and a wall will be decorated.

It is not the thing good, of course that it is bad.

It is life.



Tomoaki Makino "Soap Opera" #25

Tomoaki Makino "Soap Opera" #25

２

僕は中年女性を日本（東京とその周辺）とUSA(ニューヨーク周辺)で撮影した。
東京で撮影するのは言語の壁がなくコミュニケーションがスムーズだけどれども、
ニューヨークは英語をしゃべらなくてはならないのでモデル探しなどとても苦労した。（僕は少ししか英語がしゃべれない）
ただ撮影になってしまえば難しい事ははなかった。場所をディレクションし、ポーズを実演してみせ、
おばさんはその様子をを少し笑い、レッツシュート！という事なんである。
つまりそれはおばさんの写真に対する興味と僕の興味のコラボレーションであり
言葉を超えたコミュニケーションなのです。
実際文化は違い、人の性質も日本とアメリカのおばさんでは異なるけれど
撮影となってしまえばあまりかわらない　ということです。

2

I photographed middle-aged women in Japan (Tokyo and its circumference) and USA (outskirts of New York). Taking a photograph in Tokyo did not have a barrier of language, and although communication was smooth, since I also had to speak English in New York, the search for a model etc. suffered troubles very much. (I cannot speak much English)

When it is merely that a photograph is taken, I did not have this difficult thing. The direction of the place is carried out, a pause is demonstrated and shown, a lady laughs at a part of the scene, and it’s ‘Let's go!’ That is, it is the communication which is the collaboration of the interest over the lady's photograph, and my interest which exceeded language. 

Although culture is different and people's character also differs in the ladies of Japan and the United States, if it is that a photograph is taken, the situation will seldom actually change. 

http://makinotomoaki.net/

Tomoaki Makino's publications are currently available through the gallery.