Playground

• Photographer
  Shinya Ichikawa

This series was inspired by Haruki Murakami's novel 1Q84. In the novel, Tengo was waiting for Aomame on a slide in a deserted playground during the night. I happened to come across the same scene when I walked around a playground nearby with my dog. There was no one but us and a slide, seesaw and swing reflecting light from a mercury lamp in silent darkness. His novels always contain some kind of fantasy such as two moons in which we might lose the borderline between reality and unreality. In the deserted playground, somehow I felt strange air although there was only one moon. Playgrounds can be fond everywhere in our country and I thought they were too common to be a theme for my work. But after this experience, I began to take pictures of playgrounds in my city. I think Haruki Murakami’s world is so complicated that I can hardly express it in photography but I hope you will find unreality in realty in these pictures of playgrounds.