“My Portrait”

 

I work at a photo studio. 

After I take memorial photographs, I ask my clients if they could model for my artwork. 

Or, I’d sometimes quietly wait for people to pass by and ask if they could model for me. 

In front of the black stage, you stand there, under the sunlight. 

You look at the camera, smile at me, take off your mask, even before I’d ask for anything. 

I continuously take hundreds of shots, at times 500 or 1000, within a short time of a few minutes.

I encounter expressions that I had never imagined, as though they emerged from the unrecognized unconsciousness. 

They are the naked and exposed expressions that a human eye cannot capture.

Or, they are the delicate yet primitive movements of the body. 

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While shooting, selecting, and printing, I think.

In the process of selecting the very "you" from the huge number of images,

 

there are times that the firm conviction that “I had captured” would suddenly vanish.

While on the other hand, there are also times that I unexpectedly encounter the “new you” out of the blue. 

Maybe no one has a definite self at all. 

Maybe we all have an infinite version of selves within us. 

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I overlay myself on top of “you” like another layer. 

“Me” and “you” appear from the diffusion and fusion of the monochromes. 

They become one photograph, like an unknown presence, which could never be encountered twice. 

“My portrait” is a sculpture that has derived from the countless cuts of the shutter.

And, it is the cumulative love connection  between “me” and “you.”

 

Shinichiro Uchikura