Quote/Setting Sun

One step after the next, step after step, a familiar place takes form, accompanied by the sound of foot falls. While my body and soul are so steeped in the everyday that I might drown, still I somehow manage to earn a living, have tea or a drink with friends, experience new meeting and partings with an indeterminate array of individuals, all colored with feeling of happiness or sadness or anger.

The familiar place, the familiar street corner, provides limitless possibilities for the discovery of scandalous crime articles, dubious advertisements, fashions sweet and soft, quick chats held in a patch of sunlight. There are countless examples.

Sometimes , in the background behind the varied surface of the everyday, the inexplicable shadow of human existence creeps in like a fog. This shadow gets trapped at the barrier between what is expressible through words and what is not, accumulating like an unanswered riddle in the hollow of spreading emptiness, as if it is becoming some sort of creature that continues to multiply within the opaque whirlpool that is the everyday.

.....

Photography provides a verisimilar "other reality." No matter how much one might say that it presents pure fantasy or delusion, photography is about capturing an image of the outside world, which means that a photograph is only possible if it uses reality as a go-between. The life of a photograph, reborn by passing through this interactive relationship with reality, can have a powerful impact on us.


Photography as another reality / Shigeo Gocho / P52