What is the concept behind your levitation photography?
“Today's Levitation” is my ongoing self-portrait-diary project. I have been updating it since the first day of the year [in] 2011 on my blog, called "yowayowa camera woman diary" — meaning "a feeble camera woman's diary." The blog is a fictional diary of 2011, so I do not update it in real time. In fact, the date for each blog entry can be later than the actual date I took the picture, as I spend a significant amount of time choosing the best shots. For example, the latest photo uploaded was dated June of 2011.
Why do you do this? What does this work mean to you?
Firstly, I got the idea of this series from an English idiom that says "to have one's feet firmly planted on the ground," applied to a practical type of person. In Japan, we have the exact same idiom, but I am not a practical type of person at all. Therefore, I try not to have my feet "firmly on the ground" in my self-portrait photos to show my true self. When I am free of the gravity inside the picture, I feel free of any obligation to society and live without being bound to many things. In contemporary societies, we are all surrounded by social stress as we are bound by the forces of the earth's gravity. So I hope that people feel something of an instant release from stressful, practical days by seeing my levitation series.
Secondly, the most important thing is that photography has been accepted by our society as a tool for showing firm evidence of incidents through the past centuries. But it is changing now, I think. Our society is gradually finding out that photography doesn't only show the truth but also shows untrue images. It is not only about digital manipulation with Photoshop but also about our long history of photographic propaganda. For example, politicians had been showing their "untruly" clean images through carefully controlled portraits through the 20th century. And now, we all know that those portraits never give us any reliable information about the politician's truth. We all have been learning the two different ends of the possibilities of photography: showing the truth, and showing untrue images.
I think, therefore, my levitation series, as a contemporary art project, has to reflect this understanding of photographic expression.... I hope that my levitation series can be the key which awakens essential questions about things we can see through our eyes: "What is truth?" or "What is untruth?