Takako’s friend Michico Kamagata, a photographer, has an exhibition at Gallery Tosei going on right now.  I helped them to translate her statement on this exhibition from Japanese to English, so this marks my first-ever credit as a translator 🙂

白を掬う

When I am looking at scenery through a lens,
I sometimes become very conscious of the sound of my own breathing.
I hear it very loud, as if my ears were covered with my hands.
The scenery, so nearly tangible and yet so unreachable, flusters me.

As I tried to capture this unsettled feeling on photographic paper in the darkroom,
my photographs started losing black and gaining white.
I began to think that I might find out where my uneasy feeling was coming from
by collecting white and shedding light on the slightest indication of the other world
which exists right next to ours.

It has been many years since then.
I stopped caring about the source of this feeling anymore,
and started just appreciating the beauty and “quiet humidity”
which I sense from white.
Now I can even enjoy being provoked by this awkward feeling of strangeness.

（Translated by Eric Silverman & Takako Nose)