Photo Objects
By Shin Terada
An emotion is not in the head. It is born and is left in the heart. During our life in this brutal world, we have put a heavy lid on this precious emotion. Then, I try to force the heavy lid open to find the human tenderness and warm-heartedness in the mind through the photograph. I try to open the lid of the mind with the motif shot from the view of stillness rather than movement. I focus on the inside rather than the outside, on the spirit rather than the appearance, on the suppleness rather than integrity and on the tension rather than the repose.
In order to open the lid, my motif has to be beauty in order to make an impact on my viewer’s heart. One needs the thinking power to truly understand beauty of a photograph made by artificial stage effects, which will be the same beauty as “art." The photograph under the maximum removal of any artificial stage effects impresses the heart. Accordingly, my work requires the maximum removal of any stage effects.
The art kept in the memory, the brain, will be forgotten someday, but I believe that the photograph impresses directly in the mind, not through the thinking circuit but the optic nerve. It will be engraved in the memory forever and opens the heavy lid.
A glass of water to quench your thirst is the motif of my work, and the photograph is the art lived in fateful snapshot at 1/500 seconds under the paucity of correction and of repetition.
