Spring finally arrived late last week. It has been a long time coming. Between the cold and the political turmoil here in the US, it has just been brutal. With Spring comes the expectation of going out and shooting in the streets. One of the projects that I work on intermittently is called Another City. I am not really a street photographer. As I always tell people, I am a photographer who just happens to shoot on city streets sometimes. The idea behind Another City is to depict the city behind the city in New York. I want to shoot the back streets, the edges of the island, the underneath, the real and seemingly unreal. I want to shoot real people not stars, real places not attractions.
I have a few images already, but as I prepare to start shooting in earnest again I decided to look at what some other photographers have done and how they have gone about depicting their City or where they live. One photographer I stumbled upon was Aya Fujioka. I had never heard of her until a few weeks ago. I found her on Instagram but suddenly realized she was photographer of significance. Aside from following her on Instagram I also was able to get her Kimura Ihei Award–winning photobook “Here Goes River.”
From the publisher: “Images of life, remembrance, mundane modernity, and innocence orbit the Atomic Bomb Dome- a structure and totem which acts as the nucleus of the series. All the while, the seven rivers flow through the pictures. Fujioka also evokes other rivers in her city – rivers of humanity in forms of tourists, of citizens, of shopping arcades, of Hiroshima’s web of trolley cars in which its citizens ride. Her rivers are a flow of connections between individuals, society, of life and death. The resulting book is a moving river of moments, of photographs.”
Apparently, Aya Fujioka is a native of Hiroshima and so she photographs with a knowing eye. I am speaking not only geographically. She seems to know the light of Hiroshima, the colors, where the quiet is and where the possible miracles happen. She seems to know where the angels are.
I am sure I’ll have her images and that of many other photographers and artists in mind as I prepare for an intense Spring and Summer of shooting.
Force Of Seeing 