“When I was young, my girlfriend at the time told me something to the effect of “you don’t see me, you don’t love me”. Not once, not twice, but many times. Those words still ring in my ears, and I’ve been thinking about what it means to see and love someone in a private photographic act.
I want to know what it is to love, which is unclear and abstract. When I spend time with my girlfriend, I always try to respect her without applying stereotypes to her, at least that’s how I try to treat her. I then decided to take a picture of every moment I spent with my girlfriend, every fact that was in front of me. I thought that if I could remove unnecessary concepts from my self-consciousness when I took the photographs, and if I could link the shutter with the waves of my emotions, then the “something” in the photographs would have a high degree of emotional purity, and if I could accumulate these records, then “something like love” would emerge.
At the time of writing, I have known my current girlfriend, who is pictured in this book, for less than three years. Since the first time we met, we have been taking pictures almost constantly during our time together. Although we are a few years apart in age, we have spent our time together laughing and smiling, not so different from any other lovers in the world. We are very similar in that we are not very particular about food. We didn’t waste money, we didn’t dress too fancy, we didn’t gossip and we didn’t speak ill of others, which made me feel at peace.
We had sex many times. Gradually we began to think about our lives, measuring each other’s positions, and we began to know each other’s warmth as human beings and our coldness as animals. I have photographed my lover as far as I can see, in an environment of daily changes, of acceptance and rejection, and sometimes of facts that we don’t want to face.
She is not a talkative person and rarely expresses her thoughts to me in words, but when she is in a good mood, she sings her favourite songs by Nogizaka and Chiaki Bimura with a lot of flair, using her electric motor and TENGA as a microphone. She wasn’t a great singer, but she seemed to be having a great time singing and dancing, and as I pointed my camera at her, I thought that if she could keep doing this, she would be happy.
One day, I was shown a photo of my girlfriend taken by her mother when she was very young.
I saw her as a little girl, looking at her mother’s camera with a proud smile on her face, climbing on the living room table, unafraid of the abundance of love from her family.
It was the same smile that I had seen on her first trip with me, when I had photographed her climbing the breakwater, which she could not climb alone.
When I was able to capture the image of my lover looking at me with a childlike expression, I felt that the outline of “something like love”, which had been unclear until then, became a little clearer.”
Yoshikazu Aizawa