Has there ever been a photo album as dark as this?

Strolling in the darkness without a finite destination, the photographer merges with the darkness and attracts the energy of the nature to fix it by the photography, Going through the pages one can feel the strange granules of the darkness that he has never encountered coming toward him like waves, The granules come to him as a lump of darkness that is most beautiful in this world.

 

It was in the mid-80's that I started taking pictures of night views. When I got lost in the reclaimed land along the Tokyo Bay and looked up the night sky, surrounded by the reeds in the wilderness, I felt as if Tokyo as well as Japan itself were disappearing from myself.

In 1990's. my photographs changed from monochrome to color. I had not made major photographic works with the theme of night scenes, but I often took pictures of the naked night, invisible to my eyes, with color reversal films collecting moonlight and city lights.  Colors, shadows and shapes of the night were filled with the fresh vitality that might not be imaginable in daytime. Scenes of places, ordinary and stale in the daylight, turned into the exotic ones.

Here I tried to catch the fabulous colors and shadows of the night that had not been seen in the Japanese photography.

I happened to encounter the darkest nights without colors and lights, which might seem unreal. However, they were not unreal, and I took picures at the decisive and critical moments of those nights in deep shadows. I was absorbed into the deep shadows and I could not identify myself from the darkness.

I encountered these photographs of the darkness a few years ago and I went deeper into the shadows in the background, instead of the colors and lights of night aginst the dark background. When I began to synchronize with the frequency of the dark night, I started to witness and identify the deeper shadows in the towns, forests and seacoasts.

"Ultra" is the thing that exists beyond the border of the light and the shadow. It is the atmosphere of the excessive darkness coming from the night and might be a fragment of my memory of the night of a long time ago. Here was the world's deepest shadow fixed on the photographic films. They were fabulous, horrible but heart-comforting moments passing through the end of night.  When I was absorbed into the darkness senselessly, the rough grains of darkness came up with colorless colors that disappeared in the night.