The Moment

What I find so alluring about the camera is that it allows us to view the world from an infinite number of different perspectives.

I am a photographer.
I take pictures of the city, of the people and things around me.
As a walk through the backstreets of Tokyo, I use my camera to redefine the images found there. I re-frame them and present them from a different perspective.

When I take a picture, it is the moment that I capture. The image and the moment. From day to day, moment to moment, my perspective changes. I may see something different under the train tracks or a different expression on some one's face, or see nothing at all. Not only does my perspective change from day to day, but the city changes, as well. The stencil graffiti of the girl with the rifle that I photographed last fall remains there today; if you walk out of Naka-Meguro train station, turn left and follow the tracks back towards Yutenji, you will find the same images that I saw, but the difference will be the moment, the perspective.

When I was living in a place called Shirokane, there was an old home around the corner from my apartment. Every time I walked past the house, I thought about stopping to take a picture, but never did. A few months passed until one morning, I opened the lobby door of my apartment building and met the smell of smoke and ash. I turned the corner and was stopped by barricades and fireman; the home, that for months I had wanted to capture on film, was gone, destroyed by a fire in the middle of the night. While I slept, the family was killed and their home gutted by the flames. That morning, I realized the essence of photography. A picture is not only an image, but a moment, as well ~ a moment that may last forever, like a photograph of a mountain range, or a moment that may be gone when you wake up the morning. The difference between one moment and another may even be as minuscule as the difference of a second’s hesitation before you push the shutter.

With my camera, I try to appreciate the infinite number of possibilities for images and for moments. Day to day, moment to moment, second to second, the shutter closes and the moment is gone.