Shashin-zenya

“All the meticulous preparations and the innovative ideas that go into getting the photo you want. ”In “Shashin Zenya” (“Photography Eve”), Takimoto presents in his own words anecdotes around photography, he discusses the pivotal photos in his career since going solo, along with the uncertainties he has encountered along the way, pursuing answers despite the problems, and he discusses the sense imbued in each still image.

When I joined director Hirokazu Koreeda for an in-conversation public talk at Waseda University’s Masters of Cinema in 2017, the surprising final question stumped me: “Do you think about developing young talent?” It stumped me because I had enough on my plate just looking after my own affairs, and there was practically no bandwidth for me to be thinking about that. That question has been hanging on my mind ever since. Thanks to advances in cameras and some handy tools, anyone can create beautiful photographs nowadays. But I can’t help but feel that those benefits are making photography less rewarding. I thought about photos used in advertising, moreover, considering them as photographic culture, as you might expect, I felt uneasy about whether things were OK as they were. A camera is not simply a recording device, and it does not remember things the way the human eye sees them. In early summer last year I got an email that just said, “Do you want to make a book on photography together?” I thought I’d like to answer that question and write about the complicated process you go through to create photos, my thoughts on the challenges of shoots, and their problems. I stopped going to school for a while when I was a second grader in junior high school. My rebellion against the world and the school’s education policy was intense. I couldn’t conceive of what would come next. I was lost. I remember writing an insolent complaint on the back of a blank test paper, “Educational methods intended for testing like this are wrong. We students should get education that delves more into the different interests each of us has.” I feel very lucky to have had photography. Photos say so much more than words.
Mikiya Takimoto - Afterword of this book.

GENKOSHA Co.,Ltd. / 2023 3 30 / 224pages / 435photographs / 210×148×16mm / ¥2,500+tax / ISBN4-7683-1750-2 / Design : Tomoko Yamada / Editing : Sachiko Yoshizumi ( GENKOSHA Co.,Ltd. )