Mami Iwasaki
“ ONE PLACE ”
1998Excellence Award
ARTIST STATEMENT
ONE PLACE
When I take pictures, I often stand on a pedestrian bridge and look down at the townscape and the surroundings. I question how people are struggling to realize their ideals, successful lives and to explore the reason for their existence in this world. It reminds me of the phrase I once read…
“We are here as if we were thrown into this world, the world that we share with others.
” The project “One Place” is a photo-essay about our sense of place in the contemporary, super-urbanized society.
I took pictures at many different locations...in historic cities, modern cities industrial cities, and suburban areas. What I focus on are not the different characteristics or boundaries between them, but the common qualities (sameness) among those places. It is a feeling like “No matter where you may go, you feel the same...does it mean nowhere? ”
Selecting judge: Fumio Nanjo
The air of this work is different. The light is different. And time is photographed in her work. This translucency and cool mechanical touch is extraordinary. Is that the photographer's talent to see such a thing or does her camera happen to photograph in that way? Even if the camera did the work better than eyes, it is a photographer's skill to let it do the job. The mechanical touch that makes even humans look frozen in a moment seems showing today's atmosphere. I no longer need to explain it in a raised voice.
1998Excellence Award