Quote : Setting Sun

There was one photograph.

Most of it was exposed to sunlight and the tone was like white powder sprinkled onto the print. The image itself was suffused with glaring light and taken in some kind of flat expanse. The bleak scene looked like a yard. The border between the ground and the sky was unclear, as though the light had melted the two worlds. In the left part of the image, slightly toward the lower half, there was a gray, mudlike formation, which, upon closer inspection, turned out to be a person. The form gave the overall impression of being a man dressed in a ragged, padded kimono. His unkempt hair, looking like withered grass, pointed in our direction as he looked down. At the center of the right third of the image there was a shadow cast by an assembly of persons and when I squinted, it turned out to be three children clustered together, standing still. They all appeared to be wearing rags that were cinched at the waist with cords, and they were barefoot. Their expressions were too faint to see in the print, but they all seemed to have their gaze trained in our direction. Behind the children was something that couldn't be anything other than the wall of a house. And beyond that there was something like the overlapping outlines of two sheds that were blurred together. And even farther in the distance were the shadows of trees, growing faint and hazy. Because of them the horizon was somewhat distinguishable.

Time's Fossil/ P72/ Daido Moriyama

Photography in principal is the fossilization of some actual thing, but for a landscape to be so spectacularly turned into a fossil remarkable.

Time's Fossil/ P73/ Daido Moriyama