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"When I release the shutter, it's as though I'm discovering myself."
During my young, impressionable days as a junior and senior high school student, I was in a rock band, tried to compose and sell poetry, and gave a wide range of other creative activities a try. Photography was one of those early discoveries. When I was at senior high school, I used to walk around with a twin lens reflex camera from home looking for interesting subjects to shoot.
I held my first one-man show when I rented a hall at a department store for an exhibition of photographs based on the theme of school uniforms. At the time, anti-war demonstrators were demanding an end to the conflict in Vietnam, and amid escalating student activism, young people had begun arguing for the abolition of school uniforms.
Seizing the moment, I decided to take a fresh look at those uniforms, and what they represented from my own perspective. The result was an exhibition of photographs featuring the uniforms of all of the senior high schools in Nagasaki prefecture. It may seem like a rather unusual focus, but I've never really placed any limits on my choice of subject or theme.
Photography is essentially a tool for transforming reality into images. It's the role of news photographs, for example, to show facts as they are, without a hint of fiction. Even commemorative photos are taken from the viewpoint of recording a particular event in time. However, that's not my understanding of photography. For me, the act of taking a photo is, so to speak, like searching for oneself. Far from being a means of expressing a message, I believe that photography is a tool for delving into one's inner self. So I focus on what interests me, in the hope that photography will lead me to a better understanding of who I am. And because it is a quest with no end, the photographic experience is always new and fresh.
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