The Distance to an Image

Lately I’ve had a real head of steam, and the work is moving. I can’t quite say what set it off, but considering I started making work in 2023, this year I’ve been able to focus and push things forward more than at any point in these three years.

The thing I want to do — or rather, need to do — outside of making work is exercise. The more I focus on the work, the longer I sit in the chair, and the more I want to move. But precisely because the work has momentum, I can’t carve out the time.

The stretches when I can keep exercising regularly are, more or less, the stretches when the work has stalled. Holding both at once is, for me, quite difficult. It would be ideal to manage my time and energy with some finesse, but unfortunately that isn’t how it goes.

What helps here is taking the camera out to shoot. Shooting means walking, above all. Looking at the step count my phone tracks on its own, I’m averaging 15,000 steps per outing. This has to be a large part of what keeps the work and my health in balance. Even the most unremarkable single image is the result of hours of walking.
Separately from that, this year I’ve started taking a new approach: using photographic data shot by other people in my own work. Walking out to shoot it yourself and using an image someone else took are, in fact, opposite acts.

The technical terms are “found photo” and “found image,” and in art history it overlaps with the context of appropriation art. Looking back through that history, the ways artists relate to images — and the distance they keep from them — vary enormously. How I myself might build a relationship with these images going forward is something I intend to keep exploring.

While I’ve been turning all this over, it’s gotten past one o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. The Tokyo sky is clear for the first time in a while, and the long rainy season looks close to over. Since it’s finally cleared up, I’m heading out again today, as I did yesterday, to shoot new images.