“Oblivion Terror Management†underpins my photography. When the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, most people lost everything and were desperate to find their photographs. Many victims of the earthquake began to wash the mud out of their retrieved photographs. I believe this is because of the true power of photography that assures the referent’s existence, which in this case would mean that their lives’ consistency would be assured. Consistency is substances gathering together. Each substance corresponds to an experience. Experiences can never be memories until something is suggestive of the experience, bringing it back into one’s consciousness. Thus, when people lose their photographs, people cannot help but regard this as losing the referent itself. Human beings recognise an experience A as a memory after ‘experiencing’ the experience A. Photographs can be suggestive. Experiencing the past presence in a photograph is the essential feature of photography, which strengthens life’s consistency. This wet plate collodion photograph is my first successful shot in my life. It expresses “Oblivion Terror†by the shadow that is about to overwhelm me in the photograph from the right bottom.
He grew up as the 4th generation of a family-owned photo studio.? He has mainly taken Daguerreotype, Wet plate collodion process and hand-made Dry plate collodion process photographs for his customers with his hand-made large format camera. But, since 2019, he has started to build a huge portable darkroom camera in Giroux Daguerreotype camera style in the photo studio. Customers can get inside the darkroom camera and also witness how their photo that this darkroom camera takes is developed with a photographer.
