MIDORI MITAMURA

　　As long as we are alive, neither “permanence” nor “moment” can exist. Every passing second flies into the past. No sooner do we feel “just now”, that very moment has already passed, become history. We continually lose memories throughout our lives.On the other hand, our present life actually comprises 　memories. Our memories let us realize how we are or how we feel now in relation to our past. After one hundred years have passed, all of our actual memories will have vanished completely from the face of the earth. Only various, faded records will remain. At that moment, people living in the future will assemble those fragments of records we shed daily, and they will perchance concoct many images and stories of our lives based on uncertain realities. Those records depend entirely upon the imagination, inferences and conclusions drawn by future minds. This means that the image of human life is constructed merely from personal memories. 　

　　One of the salient tools for making a record of something is photography. Why do we want to take a picture? From the early days of its origin, photography existed as a tool to leave “records” and “memories” in our everyday life, before it became Art. We are simply unable to refrain from changing and stop shedding masses of memories at every moment. Taking pictures is definitely the most efficient action in order to log those memories we don’t want to lose. We know potentially that “permanence” doesn’t exist anywhere on earth. It could allow us to try to freeze a merciless stream of time only for an instant. Instead, when we re-encounter a photo after a long hiatus, we often find something new or different from before in that image, although nothing changed in the recorded fact. Because looking into the past is facing the present, not looking back at our life.
　　When I look at photographs, I am always concerned that the reflected image in any photo is just a memory of the photographer. I am usually attracted to the photographer's intention and point of view, more than the object itself recorded in the photograph. Furthermore, it is very interesting for me to recreate an old photo and make it into a new work, as if I am taking a new picture so as to move toward the reconstructed world. Released from my memories and consideration, it leads me to a seemingly infinite number of new images and styles. They liberate my inspiration completely to create new fictional material. It gives me great pleasure to be able to create the installation – a space where personal memories, records and photographers’ intention cross over and variety of factors are assembled, in particular our daily emotions, which can in turn be shared with anybody In this moment, a special atmosphere appears, somehow like a reality or in another sense, it is like a document, inharmonious with the common atmosphere of everyday life. It is a kind of three-dimensional drama that spectators can actually step into, in that it is different from the recorded images in the two-dimensional world of photography. As a result, all the weight of history in the old photograph seems to have fallen away. And only the essential quality of the image is revealed, whether it is a document or fiction. It is just the way someone in the future might imagine it.