signed
Text: Masatake Shinohara
Photo: Rinko Kawauchi
Size: 252 x 180 mm / Hard Cover / 136P
Design: Yuri Suyama, Minami Ogahara
Languages: Japanese / English
2025
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This publication is structured as a dialogue of texts and photographs. Rinko Kawauchi replies with photographs to the text by the philosopher Masatake Shinohara, which is again responded to by Shinohara’s words. Upon writing, Shinohara says that he repeatedly recalled Kawauchi’s words: “what is important about a photo is the way one takes it, rather than what one takes.”
“In reality, we experience something. When we experience that something, it is important to ask how it came into existence in this world. (…) As I continued the exchange with Kawauchi, I came to the realization that what was at stake in the responses to the photographs was the act of directing the movements of thought towards the dimension in which things happen: that is, the place from which reality emerges. Such a dimension lies hidden behind the surface of the everyday world in which we ordinarily live.” – from the afterward. There, you will see the different sensations and emotions surfacing from the photographs, and the line of thought unfolding through such manifestations are given life as words. The text and photography interrelate to explore the depths of “light” as a subject.
What does it mean to imagine the place where we are? This entails, first of all, an awareness of the fact that we are located “somewhere.” That is, to exist means to live within a certain site, but where we are is “somewhere.” And what if we humans happen to exist within the vastness of our natural surroundings? Even though the place where we are is a stable, artificial human construction, it is nothing more than an impermanent domain, adrift on the surface of so-called nature.
Masatake Shinohara（from the text in this book）